304 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (June 30, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 014311543X
ISBN-13: 978-0143115434
Two years in the cauldron of capitalism-"horrifying and very funny" (The Wall Street Journal)
In this candid and entertaining insider's look at the most influential school in global business, Philip Delves Broughton draws on his crack reporting skills to describe his madcap years at Harvard Business School. Ahead of the Curve recounts the most edifying and surprising lessons learned in the quest for an MBA, from the ingenious chicanery of leveraging and the unlikely pleasures of accounting, to the antics of the "booze luge" and other, less savory trappings of student culture. Published during the one hundredth anniversary of Harvard Business School, this is the unflinching truth about life in the trenches of an iconic American institution.
Biography
I'm the son of an English clergyman and a Burmese mother, was born in Bangladesh, grew up in the UK, have lived in London, New York, Paris and Boston and now live in Northwestern Connecticut. I graduated from Oxford with a BA and MA in Classics, then spent ten years as a newspaper reporter mainly for The Daily Telegraph of London. From 1998-2002, I was the paper's New York correspondent and from 2002-2004 it's Paris Bureau Chief. During that time I reported on scores of events from more than 20 countries, led our newspaper's coverage of the 9/11 attacks on New York, and interviewed politicians, movie stars, religious conservatives and libertines. In 2004, I decided to leave Paris and go to Harvard Business School, where I received my MBA in 2006, an experience I wrote about in Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School. Since then, I have worked at Apple, developing an internal executive education program, as a writer at the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship and Education, and as a contributing columnist to the Financial Times. In 2012, I was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, when I had the extraordinary experience of meeting and interviewing Silvio Berlusconi. I am married and have two sons and a dog.
