Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton
My review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
For the first ~270 pages Phillip Delves Broughton does a very good job of reporting what happens on the prestigious HBS campus. He chronicles the classes, the case studies, the students, the teachers, and the job hunt in a manner that helps you feel like you were there.
However, his last 10 pages devolve into a preachy chorus of all that is wrong with HBS, all that is wrong with business in general, and why he is above it all. He implies that if you care about your family, then you can’t go into business. And if you go into business then you must not care about your family. Definitely BS in my opinion.
Bottom line, if you have any interest in understanding what business school is all about, then I recommend reading the book. Just make sure to come to your own opinions about the merits of a career in business.
Sean Flynn 
His book appears to have been very prescient. This year has seen the crash of the debt leveraging he describes, and its impact on the jobs market, which in turn contributes to continued economic instability.
Companies like Simmons and Hinckley, which should have been able to weather the storm, were flipped like houses, and sank under the weight of the debt. This forced layoffs, and those layoffs can be directly attributed to the debt leveraging schemes.
It’s a death spiral, and Broughton predicted it with an almost scary level of detail. If he could see it at his graduation, why couldn’t so many others predict it? Or did they also realize the implications of the debt leveraging path, and just decided to take what they could while the opportunity was there?