The Not-So-Smart World of Harvard Business School

           Ever since my graduate school days, as I pored over Renaissance love poems and Anglican sermons in pursuit of a Ph.D. in English, I have had a voyeur’s interest in the Harvard Business School, that megalith across the Charles river from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Divinity School, and other more ivory-clad Cambridge towers that are among the fiefdoms of the World’s Greatest University.  Any school that can charge over $57,000 in tuition and fees, and $11,000 for a week-long seminar, can get top price for its Review, then recycle the articles into thin $25 paperbacks, and can count Michael Bloomberg, Mitt Romney, Meg Whitman, and Robert McNamara among its alumni is surely good at what it does.

            Fortunately HBS drops some crumbs for gleaners who follow in the wake of its giant harvesters.  One of these is the HBR Ideacast, a podcast that features 10-15 minute interviews with the authors of new Review articles.  You can listen to the gist of a hot new article or a reflection by a master of the business universe for free while working out or driving.  Some of the ones I’ve listened to have been very impressive: Martin Seligman, Edgar Schein, Warren Bennis, Sherry Turkle, Oliver Sacks, and even Francis Ford Coppola have appeared. 

            Unfortunately, Ecclesiastes’ observation that of the making of many books there is no end is all the more true in the publish or perish world, and sometimes what passes for business wisdom falls very short. 

            Case in point, and only the most egregious of many such: one Richard Ogle, whose book Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas was actually published by the Business School in 2007.  The interviewer began by explaining Ogle’s thesis: “creative breakthroughs and great innovations don’t simply emanate from the minds of individual geniuses” but “are born from intelligent networks” that “access something you call idea spaces.”  I don’t know about you, but I only get the “don’t” part of that statement.

            At any rate, as the interview progressed, I found myself surprised by the examples Ogle gave: Rupert Murdoch’s brilliantly intuitive acquisition of MySpace in 2005, David Wallerstein’s supersizing idea, first used for  popcorn and soda at the movies, then brought over to McDonald’s; Ruth Handler’s creation of the Barbie doll.  Oddly, it seemed that all the ideas did emanate from the minds of individual “geniuses,” but let that go for the moment.

            Murdoch’s brilliant decision, made twenty months after Facebook had launched,  ultimately resulted in News Corp’s selling MySpace at more than a half billion dollar loss, and an additional half billion in losses before the sale.  Anytime you sell something for 6% of what you paid for it, your genius score obviously takes a huge hit. 

            Of course, no one is immune from financial blunders, or from praising eventual blunderers, but considering the whole Murdoch enterprise and its current fairly predictable humiliations, was this the best choice of examples?  (Murdoch is now being wonderfully evoked in the person of Sir Richard Carlisle, an early 20^th century British tabloid mogul based on the real Alfred Harmsworth, in Downton Abbey.  Bet he won’t be half as villainous as Murdoch himself.)

            The supersizing example is even more remarkable, not only for its choice but for the arguments behind it.  After all, Ogle was interviewed in 2007, three years after Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” had exposed the McDonald’s regimen’s effects, and had caused the company to phase out supersizing in favor of an “Eat Smart Be Active” campaign.

            Ogle’s explanation of the original brilliance of supersizing is even less persuasive than his evaluation.  According to Ogle, movie theaters wanted people to go back for second helpings, but Christian ethical prohibitions against greed inhibited them from doing so. Wallerstein realized that offering one huge portion avoided the stigma of greed and thus increased sales.

            Assuming that Ogle’s argument even passes what Alan Dershowitz called “the giggle test,” it’s hard to know where to begin challenging it.  Do people who go back for seconds, at buffets for example, look more greedy than people who heap their plates to overflowing the first time around?  How profoundly do Christian views of greed affect the population of the most Christian and most obese country in the world?  And didn’t Ogle ever go to the movies?  Most of us don’t go back for seconds because we don’t want to miss anything, just as we all hang on and rush to the rest rooms when the credits come up.

Regarding Christian ethics and gluttony (which is really the term Ogle should have used), last year Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine published a study reporting that religious people were 50 percent more likely to become obese, while the Gallup Poll’s 10 most religious states are all among the 20 most obese states (including #1,2,4 and 5), while the 10 least religious include 8 of the 20 least obese states. 

Finally, isn’t there something distressing about Ogle’s apparent definition of brilliance?  To choose, out of all the possibilities available, businesses that contribute to so many cultural ills, from the sexualization of childhood to numerous physical ailments, to the incivility of public discourse, suggests that the only criterion for genius that Ogle and his publishers recognize is pecuniary.

Why not, for example, single out the creation of microloans for developing countries, the use of multi-drug therapies for HIV, the invention of adaptive technologies for people with disabilities, online fundraising for charities, and innumerable other recent innovations that have actually done good while usually both making money and making people more productive and happy?

            Of course I’m only judging the book by what Ogle chose to cover in his interview.  But if the coming attractions seem awful to you, how bad is the movie going to be?