Mark H. McCormack: What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School

I would like to devote the next few blog entries to book recommendations that may be interesting in business context.

Once upon a time, at the dawn of the political and economic changes in Hungary, when even Corvinus was known as Karl Marx (just to clarify; the Budapest University was not yet named after the King Corvinus) and when the word „Burger King” was explained in footnotes (!) to the silly reader. It was during this time, that this book appeared, which was written in 1984 and could be found in Hungarian on bookshelves in 1988 – as the period’s best seller.

Looking carefully it from today’s perspective, the writer introduces an extremely arrogant, aggressive, competitive, offensive leadership negotiation strategy as a pledge for success, a form of, „dig dig and you will but find” message.

Some of his controversial suggestions listed for example: don’t make friendship with employees, sometimes arbitrary decisions must be made, everyone should always respect who’s the boss, positive motivation is never enough, a little fear factor is always necessary so as to prevent people from becoming lazy, strategic shifts and jumps as well as all other changes should be approached randomly, a public share company cannot be properly led, a boss is always right („least said soonest mended”) and in any case the existing company structure should be respected and never to be challenged – Today it tells of a static world we can be even envious of! In today’s dynamic business environment, innovative and successful companies have proven their successes without following such principles.

The book does not speak in any way about partnerships, win-win solutions, assertiveness, in fact no partners are mentioned, only rivals who need to be conquered. The writer forcibly rams the reader with suggestions as to how to make people become indebted to us with a series of presents and favours. This is all done for a certain interest, meaning when the time comes, we will be able to ask for favours that cannot be turned down, in other words to shamelessly get back the price of everything; so finally that is hand over the invoice. This seemingly successful approach, today appears to be quite repugnant, even so it is interesting to read.

It would be rather naive of us to think that those who represented this school have all passed away, or that this trend is absent of followers today. It’s enough to simply think of the attitude epitomized by some politicians and bussinesmen…

Something that we should all learn from this book is that „a free lunch does not exist”, in other words: a heavy price may later at any time be payed for a favour that is at first one sided, free, and unreturned.