If you believe my fellow Brit Philip Delves Broughton, ambitious and accomplished (if impressionable) young people matriculate in top US MBA programs, and jargon-filled, hubris-fuelled robots graduate from those programs. As entertaining as I find his work, my personal experience has been quite at odds with this assertion.
I entered business school with a soft spot for ear candy. For example, I used to love the story told by Ben Zander about two shoe salespeople who go to rural sub-Saharan Africa. After a week going from village to village, one writes back, “This trip has been pointless – they don’t wear any shoes here.” The other reports back, “What a terrific opportunity – they don’t wear any shoes here.”
Such Disneyland clap-trap has long appealed to me. But, I find myself with less of a stomach for it after spending nine months at Tuck. Generalizations, such as, “Investors look for x”, and under-cooked thoughts, such as, “We should come up with a quantitative measure to capture this” are now irksome to my ears. The folly of superficial solutions has become increasingly apparent as the Tuck curriculum has adapted my way of thinking. No longer am I satisfied with audio glucose. I crave meaningful, insightful, supportable, hard-headed solutions. Ultracrepidation is a crime I have so often been guilty of and now struggle to abide. I imagine my nausea for platitudes will grow alongside my ability to ask sensible questions over the next year at Tuck.
On hearing Ben Zander’s quote again, the merry leprechaun in my heart who would previously have leaped and giggled is silent. Now, my head is full of questions. Is it hopeless, or is it a terrific opportunity? Well, it depends. And the wonder of the Tuck curriculum, is that I now have in my arsenal a vast ammunition of questions to ask, frameworks to apply and methods of data gathering to help determine what it depends on, and maybe even determine which of the salespeople was right.
Investors look for different things, depending on what kind of investors they are. And, while there is a time and a place for quantitative measures, it is now always, everywhere. Allow me this hypocritical ending: The devil is in the detail.
Read the full article: Losing my appetite for platitudes