A TWO-YEAR DOSE of hot-housing at Harvard Business School left Philip Delves Broughton short-changed. Ninety-eight per cent of his year group found high-flying jobs as executives or entrepreneurs. Two thirds went into finance, management consulting, or technology firms. Broughton has written a book about his experiences.

The £19,000-a-year fees sound less excruciating in the context of the £70,000-a-year average starting salary for Harvard MBA graduates. But unless his book becomes a perennial bestseller, Broughton will fall well below par as far as earnings are concerned. And he seems to have failed on two counts. The author left daily newspaper journalism for the Boston boot camp because he wanted a career change. Yet he is still writing.

Broughton is a good writer, however, and one of the lessons he learns is that effective and satisfied MBA-ers succeed in an industry they know. He sketches out the Harvard curriculum and his fellow travellers with skill and wit. He is sympathetic to the business-school ethos, but tells how he struggled with differences between lying and bluffing, subterfuge and strategy.

In one delightfully barbed passage he tells of how he was lectured on the importance of “passion” in “a listless monotone” by an executive he imagined venting frustration with “a string of violent expletives and punches to the kitchen wall”. Broughton says that students often teach themselves and insight comes in spite of, as well as because of, the professors.

Getting people to pay attention is 70 per cent of the battle, according to one visiting speaker. A classmate on sabbatical from Wall Street tells the author: “You can't get upset about these valuations not being right ... they make no claim to be exactly right. They are negotiating tools.”

Broughton discovers that making the best decisions with incomplete information is another goal. A “shark”, he learns, is business lingo for someone who gratuitously and publicly discredits others.

Harvard Business School counts directors of nearly half the British companies listed in the FTSE 100 among its alumni. George W. Bush and Henry Paulson, the US President's Treasury Secretary are others. Broughton's work is a handy introduction for those who crave the mega-bucks and mega-power that HBS brings many of its graduates. But while it is not the kind of book that non-business readers will naturally reach for, it deserves a broader audience.

What They Teach You at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton
Viking, £12.99; 304pp
Buy the book

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