WHAT THEY TEACH YOU AT HARVARD BUSİNESS SCHOOL

Philip DELVES BROUGHTON

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2020'nin ilk kitabı,dayım tavsiye etti, yükek lisansı hangi daldan yapmak istediğime karar veremiyordum, MBA yapmayı düşünüyorsan veya nasıl birşey olduğunu merak ediyorsan bunu oku dedi. Hızlı, akıcı ilerleyen bir kitap. Yazar Harvard’ın MBA programından mezun olmuş bir adam. Okuldaki 2 yıllık eğitim hayatında başından geçenleri, eğitim sistemini, harvard’da işletme masteri yapmanın nasıl birşey olduğunu akıcı ve espirili bir dille anlatıyor. Bir işletme masteri programında hangi konuların tartışıldığını ve derslerin işlenme biçimini bize ‘sınıfın içinden’ anlatıyor.

10/7 konuya meraklı olanlar okusun, eğlenceli bir kitap, sırf okurken bile elit bir eğtim alıyormuşsunuz hissi veriyor. İşletme yüksek lisansı yampanın nasıl birşey olduğu hakkında bir fikriniz oluyor.

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Why are you treating me like this, Im the customer. No you’re not said the HBS employe, You’re the product.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though chec- kered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory or defeat. — Theodore Rooselvelt

İf everything ended for you right now, would you be happy with the life you have lived?

Have you lived the life you should have? Have you done everything you could have? Have you? Have you?

Why do you want to come to this business school ? And what have you done in your life up to now that makes you think a business education at this school would be worth your time and ours?

Dont bring i’ll never, bring i’ll try.

Students will learn buisness by analyzing real situations and discussing them in class.

Desicion making, discussing and dealing with uncertainty that we were there to learn. İt was the human interreaction that made the HBS so great.

HBS mission to educate leaders who would make a difference in the world. — He used to arrive at his office at dawn and work in silence until lunchtime.

Only then would he engage with the world. Returning telephone calls, answering letters. Such discipline had propelled him to the leadership of the school.

What is OCRA Optimal Combination of Risky Assets. İt is the point where you get the maximum benefit from diversification. You have diversifiedt enough to minimize risk for this level of reward, but not diversified so much that you are getting less than you should.

The key was to make reasonable assumptions for a reasonable period into the future, normally five to ten years. The next step was to predict costs. Would revenue growth require some additional investment, a new factory, perhaps in 5 years of time?

Part of the reason ordinary savings accounts offered such minuscule returns was that they were highly liquid. İf you tied up your money for a long period, you should ex- pect to be rewarded for that.

Risk is not just the possibility of something bad happening, but also the chance of something good not happening.

The key is to keep your focus on the price of the stock in relation to the future cash flows it will generate.

You basically want to look at companies much as you would people Do they work hard? Are they honest? Likable ? Creative? Entrepreneurial? Do they spend more than they earn? Are they mortgaged to the hilt? What if they lost their job tomorrow, what would happen? Would the find one quickly?

İf we could not explain finance to our mothers, then we did not properly unders- tand it ourselves.

The idea of private, discreet fulfillment being of equal worth to public success was nearly impossible to grasp.

Every cent spent now he viewed as ten cents lost in the future.

İn 15 minutes, you have to make a realistic bid to purchase Harvard Business School. How much do you bid? They were trying to see how I went about the process of valuation. Who’s buying? I asked. You’re said the man. But am ı a private company planning to turn HBS into an executive retreat or an educational business or a real esta- te developer or what? They shrugged. I began building a balance sheet for HBS, listing its assets, liabilities, and equity. Could the school still call itself HBS? Would it retain its links to Harvard? İf not, what would this mean for one of the schools key assets, its professors?

What makes a stock price move? Fundamentally, the price moves according to changing expectations of future earnings.

A beautifully run restaurant with the greatest chef in the world could be an economic disaster, while owning a few grubby fast food franchises could make you a millionaire.

İt came in two flavors: either you had a cost advantage, whereby you made things cheaper and sold them cheaper, or you differentiated your product somehow, either by making it better than your rivals or by designing it differently to appeal to a dif- ferent kind of people. These two forms of differentiation were known as vertical and ho- rizontal: vertical meant better or worse, Horizontal meant different.

Building sustainability is the strategists next challenge.

Cheper devices of equal quality failed in the marked people were ready to pay more for an ipe for its familiarity, the cool brand association, and its compatibility with iTunes and other apple products.

İf you empoy people, and their jobs depend on you, you can’t treat your business like its poker.

Everyone in business is basically bulshitting its way through, finding a way sa- ying yes before he is ready, overpromising, under hyping, anything just to get by. Call it bluffing or anything else you like, but the environment is not kind for the honest man.

Back then, the Concorde was my bus and the fours seasons my canteen.

Dept, we found, is the fuel of modern finance.

There seams to be an anarchic streak in anyone who has taken a real risk in his life.

Be a principal or a desicion maker, not a service provider.

When you do things in life that have a good feeling, they tend to work out well.

Einstein: One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result. And the knowledge of the value to the rest of the community.

Most ideas are good ideas said roger. The differentiator is how they get imple- mented. And that’s about you.

They enjoyed sitting in judgement and looking terribly pleased with themselves, to the point where all you wanted to do was slap them to life and demand they do something. ( for VentureCapitalists)

Elevator pitch, The pitch had to answer these questions: what problem will this product solve? And why should ı buy it from you?

Entrepreneurial marketing, he said, was about the relentless pursuit of the cus- tomers and partners necessary for the people leading the firm to select their business opportunities, to sell their product or services, and to obtain the future resources they

desire.

Persuade others to commit to your idea before knowing it would work.

Pragmatists find safety in numbers.

There is always money for a good idea.

İmagine a market where ten different vendors sold bananas. The moment one dropped his price, all the others would have to or else they would have no customers. But there would be a fleeting moment for the buyer who spotted the lower price to buy the cheaper bananas and sell them at the higher price before everyone in the market saw what was going on and dropped their prices. He would be the arbitrageur. Arbitrage is the making of a riskless profit. You sell one pro- duct and immediately buy an identical product at a lower price with the funds from the sale.

The risks most people ignored were the very low probability risks of chatastropic outcomes. Perhaps the odds of the babysitter turning out to be a kidnappper are 0.001 percent. But what would be the cost of losing him? İnfinite. When people talk about trade offs in their personal life, they often keep it in a very high level. İf ı take this job my salary will be higher, but ıll spent less time with my family. But what if you turn that less time with my family into the actual consequences you most fear? Your spouse will leave you. Your children will treat you as stranger. And then assign a probability to it Each outcome used to carry a bearable 5 percent risk. Now that rises to 25 percent. How does that 50.000D USD pay increase feel now that you have now raised the odds of jeopardizing your entire family life by 20 percent?

One had to truly trust in capitalism to believe that trading like this served the goal of efficiently allocating resources in society.

The real secret to making money was wanting to make money. Not in the sense of oh id like to make a bit more money. But everyday waking up and thinking right, look at all the money sloshing around here.

Was I a finance person, or more suitable for marketing, or product management or strategy?

Margins don’t just fall a bit and then settle at a lower level. They could just fall and keep falling until there was no economic reason to be in newspapers at all.

Goverment generates no revenues. Government lives off taxes generated by bu- siness and people that work in business.

To return calls and emails in a timely way put us 99.9 percent ahead of our com- petitors. People can’t believe it. And we can’t believe that people can’t believe it beca- use we think everybody should do it. The email auto reply funvction, he said, was the equivalent of giving your customers the finger.

Unlike many other at school Felix seemed to look at the world not as a vast problem in search of solutions, but rather as a glorious mess to be wallowed in, enjo- yed, and, in perhaps, if oyu were lucky, dimly understood.

We also studied the effect of social pressure on companies, how campain gro- ups out to make a name for themselves often went after the biggest targets they could with the most embarrassing issue they could find. Environmental groups, for example, did not always tackle the worst offenders but rather the ones most likely to be embar- rassed and to bring their clause the greatest attention.

Do what you love Don’t settle. Take risk now, because it will be much harder la- ter in your life.

You should not have multiple centers in life, İt would only lead to confusion.

İt took Perelman until his mid thirties to really get going, but once he got going, he was unstoppable.

When we look back, the big things will look small and the little things will look big.

Comparison is the death of happiness.

We are all we have. No one else will rescue us.

Measuring oneself against ones friends or peers could only lead to misery, because always, in some area of life, there will be someone doing better than you.

He urged us not to be career engineers but is amply to learn and grow at every opportunity.

Professional happiness, he said, would come from being very good at something difficult.

HBS he said, is a factory for unhappy people, we have so many choices, and yet so few people seem happy about that. İt just makes them anxious.

The single biggest thing he had taken from HBS, he said was the confidence. At conventions ill just go up to CEOs of other companies and just start talking. HBS gave me confidence that I have a right to be wherever ı am.

I learned to think in a very different way. İn the beginning, when we first had thirty seconds to make a point in class, you didn’t get anywhere. By the end, you know how to say things quickly and you learn to think before you talk. İt is a very structured way of thinking.

İf you were going to start a business, you had better be ready for a lot of thank- less hard work while you got it off the ground.

They believed that there were well-trodden routes to worldly success and if they absorbed the pain for long enough, such success might make them happy satisfaction delayed was better than none at all.

There were 3 steps: Define a clear objective, develop a plan to achieve that ob- jective, and systematically monitor progress against the plan. This was still the essence of the HBS method, strategy, planning, and measurement.