Harvard Business School’s reaction to Ahead of the Curve

Well, it hasn’t been great. The school is evidently angry about the book and many students, both past and present, seem to feel it is unfair and damaging.

The official administration reaction was offered by Carl Kester, the deputy dean. You can read it here.

The HBS student newspaper also published a story on students’ reaction to the book, as well as reviews by a student currently at the school, and one by a member of the class of 2008, now working as a management consultant.

I take a particular savaging from the consultant, Alex Godden of Bain & Co. in San Francisco. She finds me to be unfunny, a bad writer, very sad and evidently friendless and self-loathing. Her clients should beware.

She also wonders in the piece why, if I had planned on writing a vicious expose of the school – which I hadn’t – I didn’t write about people hooking up in hot tubs on student retreats in Vermont. It was an omission. I apologize. Students did apparently hook up in hot tubs in Vermont. I just wasn’t lucky enough to be there.