Spoke with an alum of the Harvard Business School today who, for reasons I won’t reveal to protect his identity, knows hundreds if not thousands of other alumni who’ve graduated throughout the past years and decades. He confided to me that it’s something of a running joke at the exalted institution that the finance portion of HBS is not all that good, and a lot of folks — at least those who don’t go in already strongly oriented toward finance — leave without a strong understanding of how to, say, manage like a CFO. “Some people derive a certain strength from that,” he said, by which I guess he meant that if you don’t know something to well, you can then hire someone who does and manage them. You don’t, in other words, get too bogged down in the pesky spreadsheet details and can concentrate on the big-think strategy stuff.
Wharton, he said, was by contrast known as a finance powerhouse.
