Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 12, 1994 by Neal B. Freeman

IF HARVARD Business School is the West Point of Capitalism, and Stanford is the Yale of the West, that makes Stanford Business School--what? Well, according to Peter Robinson, it's Sheer Agony and the inscription over the portals should have read, "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here." For that's how Mr. Robinson sees himself in Palo Alto, as a poet in Hell.

Poets, in B-school lingo, are the few members of the first-year class who come, mathematically speaking, from disadvantaged backgrounds. They are career-shifting English majors or track-jumping corporate types or, in Mr. Robinson's case, speechwriters leaving the Reagan White House. At Stanford, they are up against the consultants and investment bankers who are already comfortable with spread sheets, discounted cash flows, and other quantifiable esoterica. The competition between the two cultures is dreadfully unfair and Mr. Robinson records it here at painful length.

The purpose of this volume, as Mr. Robinson says, is to answer the question: "What is business school like?" And he does. More so than most of the books in this genre--one thinks, among others, of One L.--Snapshots takes a curious, comprehensive walk through the academic year, pausing to collect perspectives from odd angles. And given the author's tour as a phrase-maker for the Great Communicator, it's not surprising to find the tale told in crisp, post-collegiate prose.

And what is B School like?

The first year at Stanford Business School is a series of 18-hour days devoted to the study of Decision Making under Uncertainty, Computer Modeling, Financial Accounting, Organizational Behavior, Data Analysis--you get the idea. Stuffed with jargon and precrunched numbers, course material is not calculated to light the poet's fire. Mr. Robinson feels uninspired, overwhelmed, underprepared, and generally put upon. (One must confess to the occasional impulse to interject: "Lighten up, man. It's not the Bataan Death March.")

Mr. Robinson paints a grim picture of life at one of the country's elite business schools, but I sense that the reality may be even grimmer than that. For starters, there is nothing in the curriculum--nothing--to make the case for free markets, for the intellectual basis of the American business system. You can get all the way to an MBA from Stanford, it appears, without ever having read Hayek or Adam Smith or even Stanford's own Milton Friedman. Again, there is nothing in the curriculum (at least as far as Mr. Robinson recounts his experience) about products, or services, or innovations in either area. The course work is concerned with the maintenance of organization and the development of process. Stanford seems to be training the nation's. best and brightest not to make things and sell things but to observe, to interface, to tweak, to shuffle the papers and divide the pies. The Stanford Business School seems to be turning out the functional equivalent of... lawyers.

Give me a poet any day. One who would stand in the well on the opening day of the first term and proclaim to the nervous students around him: "If you forget everything else you learn here, remember this. All business is modeled on the structure of the doughnut shop. There are two real jobs in the doughnut shop--the guys who make the doughnuts and the guys who sell the doughnuts. Everything else is overhead."