The Ivey Files

Recently I posted my reactions to a new book about Harvard Business School called "Ahead of the Curve," by recent alum Philip Delves Broughton. Philip thought I had misintepreted his reflections in the book, and he was kind enough to elaborate on his experiences as an HBS student and let me pick his brain. Here's our email exchange about the value of an MBA for career changers, the HBS culture, teaching leadership and ethics in the classroom, being a humanities guy in an Excel world, and more:

 

AI: I got the sense from your book -- I think you even say so expressly -- that you weren't terribly clear in your own mind about what you were hoping to do with your MBA before you embarked on business school. It sounds as if you went to business school hoping to take more control over your life, and you assumed you'd be able to work out the specifics of a career change while you were there. That didn't seem to come together as neatly as you had hoped -- by the end of the MBA program, you were still trying to sort out what you wanted to do, and you were finding the job search harder than expected. In hindsight, do you wish you had done more planning or soul-searching before starting business school?

PDB: No, I was pretty clear about why I was going. I needed to be. I left a great job to go to business school. The challenge was remaining clear about it under the kind of peer pressure you find at a business school. I wanted to be able to pursue my own interests while controlling my own P&L. I didn't want an employer. I wanted control over my time. Now this is pretty different from a lot of people at b-school. I didn't want a "career change" so much as more power to decide my own personal and economic fate. It's different. The book is not about my failed job search. It's about my struggle to remain on the path I set out on while pulled in various directions.

AI: I've been somewhat skeptical about the value of business school, even a top business school, for career changers, for some of the reasons you mention in the book, and also because the recruiting schedule starts so relentlessly early that you don't really have any time to navel-gaze about your career once you get there. I'm thinking in particular of the hiring interview you did with the Washington Post (pretty dispiriting), and the following:

"But I was not alone in struggling to change my career. Luis, the Franco-Argentine, complained to me that many people felt HBS failed in its promise to give people a new start. 'They say this is your chance to change industry, but very few are succeeding. You see, the problem is that the path of least resistance is to do banking or consulting. Now, if you wanted to do either of those, you probably could. But if you wanted to get out of them, you really have to fight.... If you don't have experience in an industry, they don't want you, so you end up going back to the industries you do have experience in."

Do you think career changers should go to business school? If yes, what can they do to make their time there, and the job search process, less difficult?

PDB: Career changers need to do a couple of things. The first thing, as you say, is to start thinking early about what you want to change to. Even if you're not sure, you must have a vague idea. Then use every resource - especially alumni - to help you do that. The second thing is to regard your first job out of b-school as a bank shot. You go into one of the standard b-school professions - banking/consulting - in order to drop into the career you want in a couple of years. Lots of people do that successfully. But simply hoping the MBA magic dust will transform you into the dream candidate in the career you're after is delusional. The final thing I'd recommend, is to go to places where people know you already, your home town for example - then your career to that point, plus the MBA, plus trust and familiarity will make a career change easier.

AI: In hindsight, do you think you were naive about the HBS culture (I know I was pretty tough on you in that regard in my initial blog posting), and what HBS would be able to do for your career change? Aside from reading your book, what would you recommend applicants do to educate themselves about whether business school is a good idea for them, and whether a particular school is a good match?

PDB: I wasn't so much naive as ignorant of what HBS would be like. I didn't come from a profession where lots of people went to business school. I wasn't surprised that people were like they were - but given all that we heard from the most successful business people, Buffett/Paulson/Whitman, about work-life balance, I thought people should have taken that stuff more seriously. As I say in my book, I made a lot of very good friends at HBS and admired a lot of my fellow students. Anyone reading the book as a whole - and not just the reviews - will see that. I think the best thing to do to educate yourself is find people who have been to business school and ask them. Also ask people you admire - would I benefit from this? Match only really matters if you're fortunate enough to get into a bunch of schools. Otherwise, you go to the best one you can.

AI: You write about some of the difficulties you had as a humanities guy with no quantitative or business background. How can other humanities or liberal arts types best prepare themselves if they think they want to pursue a management or business education?

PDB: Oh, this is just practice. I hadn't done math since I was 16. I had never opened Excel. You have two years to figure this stuff out, which I did. It's a hassle at first, but short of taking an Excel course before getting on campus, there's not much you can do. You pick it up pretty fast once you're there - but just have to swallow your ego while you're trying to catch up.

AI: HBS says its mission is "to educate leaders who make a difference in the world." In your book, Ben asks, "I wonder why the school can't just admit that its job is teaching people how to run profitable businesses? Why does it even think that leadership is best taught through courses on business? I mean, if it is really leadership they want to teach, why don't they have us taking history or religion courses or spending the weekends with the Marine Corps?" Do you agree? Do you think leadership can be taught in a classroom?

(I do know your thinking process changed, and that you found that valuable: "Despite my frustration at being so far behind my classmates technically and in my basic knowledge of business functions, I knew that my intellectual apparatus had toughened. I saw things in the world that I had not seen before. I looked at facts and numbers a different way" -- but that's arguably different than leadership skills.)

PDB: Yes, leadership can be taught. Not in the sense that you're teaching people how to be Churchills or Roosevelts or Napoleons even. Just in the sense of helping people think about managing organizations. Every CEO we heard from said that people management was the biggest part of their job. And this didn't mean making big speeches. It meant hiring and firing, establishing a culture, setting the right incentives - and there is a large academic component to that, in addition to any personal qualities a leader might have.

AI: You took a somewhat dyspeptic view of the HBS culture, which in parts of the book sounds like a cross between American Pie fraternity antics and some kind of EST/Maoist reeducation camp. Do you think that's unique to HBS vs. other business schools? And was perhaps your age a factor? Your non-American-ness? I got the impression throughout the book that the other non-Americans were similarly nonplussed by those parts of the HBS culture. Thoughts?

PDB: Yes, being older made me look at it differently. I was married with a child - therefore not going out to Boston nightclubs midweek. Yes, I'm British, but I've lived in America since 1998, except for 2.5 years, and my wife is American, and my grandfather, aunt and cousins are American.... so I'm not entirely "not American." Yes, I think the foreigners did find it strange. American college culture is somewhat startling to foreigners. I know it's not unique to HBS. But perhaps the contrast between the seriousness in the classroom and the frat-ishness of much of the social life was more glaring. But again, I think this exists in business culture more broadly - you have companies preaching corporate social responsibility in the morning and then doing quite irresponsible things the rest of the day. Would the more exotic nightlife of Las Vegas exist, one wonders, without business expense accounts? I think people outside business are more sensitive to this hypocrisy.

AI: In your book, your classmates come in for quite a drubbing on the ethics front. I'm thinking in particular of the "financial aid BMWs" and the large proportion of the class (3/4 or thereabouts) who thought it ethically permissible for applicants to seek access to an admissions server that they knew to be unauthorized. There seems to be a big disconnect between the values of Dean Clark and his students. Thoughts on that? And do you think ethics can be taught in the classroom?

PDB: Ethics can certainly be discussed in the classroom - but can the ethics of students in their mid-late 20's actually be changed? Not so sure. I did find the discussions thought-provoking though. I'm not sure I give my classmates a "drubbing" about ethics. I'm in no position to do that! What I do discuss, however, is the contrast between what I describe as the rather excessive - and unrealistic - piety of business ethics as we discussed in class and the reality of how most people, business students included, actually behave. HBS took ethics extremely seriously - and kind of sets itself up to be beaten up when its alumni cause the collapse of Enron, and now have their fingerprints all over the current financial mess.

AI: You write in the start of the book that it was not intended as an "inside raid." I hear that some people at HBS nonetheless took it that way. One could argue that you wanted the upside of the brand and the network, but then violated a tacit compact with the HBS community by writing an exposé. In the book you express a lot of appreciation for the power of the HBS network. Do you think you've compromised the value of that network (to you) because you've written the book? Has there been any other kind of fallout? Am I wrong entirely -- perhaps it has increased the value of your network? Why did you write the book?

PDB: I wrote the book because I thought it would be interesting and useful to do so. And because I was offered an advance by a publisher. I knew elements of my experience were shared by many of my classmates. And I think at both HBS and many big firms, one is expected either to be a 100% booster, or a bitter critic. The truth is one can be ambivalent. I say that HBS was about 80% great and about 20% weird. Most people I know who went there agree. I know some people are upset. That's fine. I don't think I violated any compact. I didn't become a Free Mason when I went there. I attended an educational establishment and paid handsomely to do so. And I wrote a book that is honest and true. For every attack I've received from the school, I've received messages from classmates and other alumni thanking me for being so honest about the experience. So I'm ok with that.

AI: You acknowledge that "the Harvard Business School classroom is a safe learning environment, a place to experiment and make mistakes...." and that's why you cloaked the identities of your classmates. You decided not to do so for professors, because you think that they have a "public role." That's not as clear to me. Don't they experiment and course-correct as well? Aren't they entitled to some expectation of privacy in the classroom?

PDB: No. They are paid extremely well for their work at HBS and earn even more from outside gigs linked to their role as HBS professors. Most professors come off well in the book. I'm only actually critical of one. They can experiment and course-correct, fine, but I was paying the school $100 per class. I think I'm entitled to do what I did with the experience.

AI: How would your wife reflect on your MBA? Is she glad you went? Any advice she would give prospective business school spouses?

PDB: My wife enjoyed it, I think. We met lots of interesting people and I was around a lot when our second son was born. The only challenge was going back to a student life and budget after living like grown-ups for so long. But that was pretty easy, and rather refreshing. Advice? Be prepared for your other half to become a navel-gazing egotist while going through the process.

And a nice bonus for people working on their Round 2 HBS essays right now: Philip also had some advice for people writing the "career vision" essay (optional this year, but in my opinion still highly recommended):

PDB: I don't think HBS wants to hear "I want to make VP at 30 and MD at 35 and partner at 40." They want to hear that you have some sense of where you want to go: do you want to be in finance, do you want to manage a factory, do you want to be entrepreneurial? Or in my case, do you want to take your proven skills in writing, journalism and being a foreign correspondent, add on some business know-how and go write your own pay check - somehow. Anyone applying to business school should be able to come up with something which is consistent with their life and professional ambitions.

A lot of Gen Y experts out there are telling companies to suck up to Gen Y's parents. Here's an excerpt from a blog posting, for example, by Tammy Erickson in connection with her book ("Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving At Work") put out by Harvard Business Publishing (meaning, she's obviously no slouch):

• Distribute packs of information for parents to students at universities and job fairs
• Hold a career fair in your community designed specifically for parents
• Create special FAQ material directed at parents' likely questions and concerns (retirement, health benefits, 401(k) plans, educational opportunities and so on
• Hold parent orientation sessions or conference calls
• Invite parents of interns and new hires to visit the Y's place of work and meet the boss and colleagues
• Provide the staffing necessary to follow through with parent requests
• Run ads communicating your positive attributes as an employer aimed at parents
• Provide incentives for parents to refer their children (beginning with your current employees - if your current employees won't refer their own children, consider whether you really are a good employer)
• Include parents in employee benefits

Do you have a parent-approved brand?

I can see the short-term benefit of this kind of recruiting strategy. Very short-term. However, I wonder what kind of people you end up with when you use that kind of selection mechanism. Maybe the same subset of Gen Yers employers complain about all the time: the ones who don't show up on time, can't follow directions, can't make even simple decisions on their own, can't behave like grown-ups. I would posit that there's a connection between that kind of recruiting and that kind of employee.

So maybe you get entry-level bodies in the door that way. But what's that going to look like longer term? When you're trying to groom young employees to rise up through the management funnel? How do you make grown-ups, let alone leaders, out of people whom you selected for their dependent, child-like qualities?

I give Gen Y's parents a really hard time about infantilizing their grown children, and now companies are being encouraged to do the same thing. I have to think that's not a good outcome for those companies as a business matter, and it's downright toxic for Gen Y.

And for those whose immediate response is, "That's what Gen Y is like, there's no way around it," I say: You're not looking hard enough. You have to recruit more wisely than this, because with some of these recruiting strategies, you are inviting longer-term headaches.

Please weigh in. Am I wrong? And Gen Yers: do you want to be treated this way? Do you think that's a good thing?

(Here's my memo to employers; my memo to helicopter parents; and my memo to Gen Y. And here's a sample HR Director's lament.)

So I was catching up on my Tivo'ed Project Runway episodes the other night when I couldn't sleep. (I won't call it a guilty pleasure -- I will defend Project Runway 'til the end!)  Thought I could escape Gen Y issues for a brief spell? No sir. In this particular episode, the lovely Frau Klum challenged the designers to "design a look for recent college graduates who are starting their lives as independent professional women."

Independent? Really? Then why did all these young women BRING THEIR MOTHERS ALONG? Naturally, the moms started dominating the working relationship with the designers, and the designers started pitching to the moms rather than to the daughters/clients. In defending their designs to the judges, the designers would say things like, "Holly and her mother seemed really happy with it" -- a reminder that with Gen Y, parents are (almost) always part of the package. How old does Gen Y have to get before their parents back off? I'm intensely curious.

In any event, with the exception of the winning design by Jerell, these were some of the worst clothes you could ever see in the workplace. Or anywhere. Yikes. (Read the blow-by-blow here.)

The blogosphere has come down hard on Michigan Law School's recently announced Wolverine Scholars Program. I'm excited when any law school innovates, so I chatted with Dean of Admissions Sarah Zearfoss to find out what's what. Our Q&A below:

 

1. Could you explain what the Wolverine Scholars Program is and who is eligible for it.

Our new Wolverine Scholars Program will invite applications from University of Michigan undergraduates who have at least completed their junior year and at most are scheduled to graduate in Winter or Spring 2009 (that is, rising and graduating seniors) who have cumulative GPAs of 3.80 or higher; review will take place during the summer, and will substitute for the usual LSAT requirement an intensive review of the undergraduate curriculum. It is a non-binding program; if an applicant is admitted, he or she is free to apply to other law schools—but since we are not requiring the LSAT of the applicants, it is of course our hope that we will attract people for whom Michigan is their first choice, and who will choose to enroll here rather than going through the hassle of applying to other law schools (including the necessity of taking the LSAT).

2. You've come under a lot of fire in the blogosphere for the program. For example, MoneyLaw, Above the Law, TaxProf, and Prof. Henderson (of Indiana) have basically accused you of a transparent attempt to game the rankings. Prof. Henderson has gone so far as to say that "the only rational explanation is that Michigan seeks a rankings payoff." How do you respond to that? If gaming the rankings wasn't your only motivation, or your main motivation, what was your reasoning behind the program?

Well, I’d have to actually say the opposite is the case—that is, a desire to manipulate the rankings would NOT have been a rational motivation for this program. Consider, if that were the purpose, whether it would make sense for a public institution whose every admission decision in recent years has been subject to FOIA requests from multiple organizations to announce something so publicly! Further, since we anticipate being able to matriculate at most 5 to 10 Wolverine Scholars—a fractional sliver of our typical entering class of 360—this couldn't be a successful route for manipulating the rankings, even if we were so inclined. That number of people couldn't possibly affect our LSAT median, and is quite unlikely to affect the GPA median by even 1/100th, let alone materially.

Instead, we were motivated by a desire to strengthen our intra-institutional ties with the undergrad community, which is our single biggest feeder and at which, nonetheless, there is a persistent, unshakeable rumor that it is impossible to be admitted to Michigan Law if one attended Michigan for undergrad. As a result, we lose a lot of people who don’t apply, thinking it’s just not worth their time—and we therefore we miss getting applications from many students who would be great additions to our class. Relatedly, we needed to think creatively about ways to increase the applications we receive from our single biggest source of in-state residents (given that we are a public institution with a goal of matriculating 20% of the class as in-state residents). Bottom-line, we had well-considered policy objectives here, and our policy decisions have never been dictated by blind obeisance to rankings.

3. If you are willing to admit X students a year without an LSAT score, why require an LSAT score from the rest of the class? Why not just do away with it completely?

We have found the LSAT to be an excellent tool for predicting first-year grades, and believe that it is an exceptionally well-designed standardized test. That does not mean, however, that there may not be limited, special circumstances where reliance is not necessary, or not appropriate. We have a LOT of data on Michigan undergrads who enroll here at the law school, and the data lead us to be very confident that we can learn what we need to about ability to succeed here from a rigorous examination of the curriculum of those students who have proven themselves able to achieve at a very high level. We just don't have that body of data for other schools.

4. Some other law schools -- including top law schools like Georgetown and Northwestern -- have admissions programs that do not require an LSAT score. Any idea why people are piling on Michigan and not on those other schools?

Michigan certainly does get people's attention when it comes to admissions issues! But I suppose it's also timing; the programs that I know of are not of recent vintage, and I do think that attention to standardized tests and to rankings has really amped up in the last couple of years.

5. Colleges and business schools innovate constantly with their admissions requirements. For example, a number of top colleges make the SAT optional, while Harvard Business School has the 2+2 program. Why do you think law schools are generally so resistant to experimenting?

I confess I have found it rather surprising that in a climate where many organizations are examining the appropriate use of standardized tests, one very small outside-the-box step by one law school should attract such apparent shocked skepticism. Law schools (and the law as a field, more generally) tend to be very conservative in their approach to any proposed changes, however, and so I suppose the reaction was not completely unpredictable. I’ve had a lot of supportive emails, though, from prelaw advisors and admissions consultants, so I’m hoping that once the initial excitement winds down, the people who really matter to us—i.e., our applicants—will see that we're trying to be critically thinking about what we're doing. That can only be a good thing from their perspective.

Good news for prosecutors, legal aid attorneys, and public defenders here.

Anna,

I read your blog before making the decision to attend law school and right on through my 1L year. I've learned a lot. Thank you.

I attend the [deleted] School of Law and received a public interest fellowship to do a summer internship at [deleted], an NGO that provides free legal services to poor farmers in Cambodia. I'm part of the land law unit, which tries to protect rural farmers from land seizures.

In a nutshell, I signed on for a summer internship in a foreign country and have done almost no substantive legal work, partly because I was placed in a dysfunctional unit, partly because of the low English level of my colleagues, and partly because I'm having a hard time creating good opportunities to do legal work.

My dysfunctional unit. One problem is my colleagues and supervisors don't seem to do much. I nicknamed one attorney "man that stares at his cell phone" in honor of his 8 hour a day activity. The lack of work is partly due to the fact that government doesn't respond to motions, follow its own laws, or respect the court system. It's common to wait months for rulings, only to find out the court is "too busy" and will not issue any ruling at all, or the case file has been lost. As a result, the attorneys often wait around and do nothing.

I think my boss is depressed about the corruption. The program's two showcase lawsuits have been going on for 7 and 4 years respectively. In the first case, the local prosecutor has refused to correctly implement the presiding judge's verdict, and in the second case everyone involved in facilitating the fraudulent sale of indigenous land has admitted to taking bribes in a transaction that was, on its face, against the law (the land was sold to the sister of the Minister of Finance).

I should provide a little more context. At the end of the Vietnamese occupation following the Khmer Rouge, there were only a handful of lawyers in Cambodia. By 2007 there were 574. A good number work for NGOs and legal aid organizations. So it's understandable that attorneys have only a shallow pool of legal experience to draw upon when considering legal strategy, but we mainly do nothing. (A side note: At our organization the lack of activity is partly due to poor organizational structure. The bylaws allow the employees to elect the management team, which creates a huge disincentive for the management team to "crack the whip" leading to the current very weak executive director).

I know that one of the themes of your blog is that Gen Y's self-involvement leads to unreasonable expectations and more than an acceptable level of complaining. So I decided to create a writing project for myself where I would investigate how to go about filing a complaint in US courts against a Cambodian-American that dispossessed 23 families using armed men and bulldozers. I thought several allied NGOs were representing the families. I went to the province and met with people from the 3 other NGOs, but no one spoke sufficient English to discuss the case. I had to get the moto taxi driver to translate, which of course didn't work since the taxi driver's English was limited to "right, left" and not "motion, complaint." Then I went and interviewed an American ex-pat restaurant owner who witnessed the seizure. He was smoking pot during the interview. Anyway, long story short the NGOs weren't representing the families anymore because they never had actual title to the land and the Cambodian-American is politically connected and paid an acceptable bribe to the local families. The memo, while a nice academic exercise, would be functionally useless. Instead I'm writing another grant proposal and shadowing my boss to his infrequent meetings with court officials (going to an hour meeting in the provinces can take 3 days after factoring in driving).

But that's it. I've got an interesting story or two about the outrageous facts in the cases, but I haven't done much substantive legal work. In on campus interviews, I can show an attorney a picture of a client meeting with a monkey in the background but not a legal memo.

I am concerned about on campus interviews. Although I am doing public interest work this summer and will have meaningful service in my legal career, I would like to have the opportunity to work for a mid-size to larger local firm next summer and after graduation. My big hairy audacious goal is to be part of the legal community that shapes [US city's] land use regulations to meet the transportation and environmental challenges of the next century.

What advice do you have? I'm actually pretty down on my summer experience. The land law unit has a poor reputation with its donors and will probably lose its funding because of its failure to do much for its clients. For me personally, the unit's inactivity means I have a lot of dead time. I also haven't learned directly from any legal professionals that speak English well. When I'm asked to comment on what I did and how I liked it, I don't want to be too negative or dishonest. But honestly: "I sat around a lot in a foreign country, went to meetings that I didn't understand, and helped absolutely no one, in part, because the judicial system is utterly corrupt" is probably a conversation killer.

A final thought. Friends and family point to the value of a foreign experience and I think they're right. But for me, I think the marginal value of this experience is low. Like a lot of students that graduated from college around the time I did, I was fortunate enough to study abroad. I went to [deleted] for a semester. I also taught English in [deleted] after graduation for six months. Granted Cambodia is very different from either of those countries, but I still have a hard time saying with conviction that for me just being in a foreign country is a good use of my 1L summer.

I look forward to your thoughts. Any advice on how to spin gold out of this straw will be carefully studied. Thank you.

 

Holy cow, you've lived a lifetime in a summer. The only thing that could have been worse is if you'd spent the summer at Latham/Cravath/Kirkland/Perkins/BlahBlah. Seriously.

To prepare for interviews, you need to take the email you wrote me, put a far more positive spin on it, and outline at a practical level the barriers that stand between land-reform-in-theory and land-reform-in-practice. That’s the perfect (short) law review article to start writing now, and the fact that you've got it under way is a great talking point during an interview. "What did you do this summer?" "I started the summer trying to protect rural Cambodians from property seizure. The summer I got was more interesting than what I signed up for – I ended up studying what’s broken about the Cambodian legal system in practice, and now I’m writing an article about it." You're going to call it "Three Barriers to Real Property Protection in Cambodia," and I will be expecting a signed copy.

I also told a lawyer friend of mine about your predicament, and here's what he said:

It’s interesting because we’re trying to get a legal clinic going in Tanzania; that’s my next uber-project, I think. Same challenges all around, though we do expect less corruption than in Cambodia. We also expect just as much inactivity, lack of movement in the courts, etc. Property rights is a big thing.

If you take the narrow view of "what law did I practice?", then yeah, his experience is limited. But that’s not what law is in developing countries anyhow. My work in Tanzania so far has been spent trying to *see* a copy of the Tanzanian legal code. I finally did in South Africa, at the supreme court.

Incredibly experienced lawyers have a tough time getting anything done in the developing world, and you are at the teeny, weeny start of that learning curve. You have to start there, so try not to get frustrated just because you're facing as many hurdles as the superstar lawyers who are also getting stuck in the mire of "international law."

Back to interviews. What else can you do? You can talk about how grateful you are to be an American living in a country with laws and rights. You can talk about how hard it is to do any real legal work in a country where the government and the courts are hopelessly corrupt and no one bothers to do much about it. That’s not an interview killer; it’s an interview opener, especially if you approach it with humor and grace.

In the meantime, there's no need to mope around being depressed. You're there to help people, right? OK, you can’t do much legally, and I think you're right about that part of it. But you can do two things – you can learn and you can help. You should learn all you can about Cambodian law and government so that if it ends up being a country you care about, you can work for change there the rest of your life. You should go out into the community and do anything you can to help them. Teach English. Help with infrastructure projects. Pitch in at the local medical clinic. Anything. You went there not only to get experience for yourself, but to serve, right? So serve in whatever way you can, whether it's through your NGO or not. You'll be helping the people you came to help, albeit not in the way you originally intended. Add to that a positive attitude, good war stories, and a sense of humor, and law firms would be crazy not to hire you. They'll see a self-starter, a team player, and a smart guy who knows how to make lemonade. What more could you want in an employee?

You are also infinitely wiser than you were at the start of the summer. You've been up to your elbows in the glamorous world of "International Law" that every law school applicant and his brother swears he wants to practice. Good for you that you've gone out and done it, and figured out what that really means, and have a bunch of stories to tell.

And to think you could have been sitting around in some air-conditioned American law firm writing memos that no one will read about Section 226 of the Labor Code ("Social Security Number Truncation on Pay Stubs"). You are way, way ahead.

Usually the parents of applicants drive me a little nuts, but yesterday I received a lovely email from an applicant's father who reminded me that a little perspective goes a long way when people go into panic mode. And this time of year, applicants are going into serious panic mode.

The family crisis? The applicant -- call her X -- had just found out that the superstar professor who had promised to write her a recommendation a few months back has decided not to write any this coming semester. X started stressing, called a family conference with her parents, and agonized over this lost opportunity.

Once X and I hopped on the phone, I told her the following:

• Recommendations don't really matter all that much in the law school admissions process (unlike business school). Very few end up changing the admissions officer's analysis in a material way. You want to be smart in deciding whom you ask and how you ask, but after that, it's largely out of your hands, and not a big factor anyway.
• Yes, sometimes faculty are jerks. Yes, talk is cheap. Nothing you can do about that.
• If someone you ask for a recommendation declines to write one, don't push. I'd much rather he be honest wtih you and let you move on to another recommender, than have him say yes and write you a "meh" recommendation (and you'd never even know that the letter he sent was "meh").
• There are some things you should worry about in the application process. This turn of events isn't one of them, so don't lose even one more minute of sleep over it.

The conversation took all of ten minutes, but apparently it made an impression, because X's dad then sent me the following email:

Anna -

Although we have never met or even spoken, I have with great interest and admiration observed your comments and advice to X (a wonderful young lady), and do most appreciate your helping her, as your guidance is simply terrific.

A wise man once told me "never sweat the small stuff, and it's almost all small stuff."

Should you tire of advising law school applicants (of course only after X gets accepted to several great law schools), I suggest you consider expanding your consulting practice to include advising:

a) Husbands on how to treat their wives.
b) Wives on how to treat husbands.
c) Partners on how to treat partners, or
d) large corporate clients on anything.

Thanks for all you do for my favorite daughter.

Aside from being the sweetest thing ever, this email from X's father reminded me to remind you not to confuse the big stuff and the little stuff.

I'm intrigued by Brian Leiter's rankings of law schools based on the success rates of its graduates in the 2006-2008 law school teaching market. If you don't want to read the rankings, here are some take-aways:

1. Yale was the most successful school (45% placement rate); Chicago was second (43%), followed by Stanford (41%), Harvard (37%), and UVa (35%).

2. Harvard and Yale accounted for 40% of all new faculty hires (90 out of 231).

3. Harvard had 126 grads in the market last year; Yale had 97. (The Yale number is astonishing, since they have a class about one third the size of Harvard's. By comparison, Chicago, which is the same size as Yale, had 28.)

4. DC schools apparently attract lots of people who want to teach, but few of them are successful. Three DC-area schools (Georgetown, American, and GW) had 125 grads in the market -- only 8 were placed, and all of them were from Georgetown. Georgetown alone had 80 grads in the market (placing 10%), while American placed 0 out of 27 and GW placed 0 out of 18.

5. Tulane is a real oddball in the top tier of placing schools -- its 20% placement rate outperformed Berkeley, Duke, Penn, and some other top schools.

I don't get books like this new one called Ahead of the Curve by recent HBS graduate Philip Delves Broughton. He was apparently shocked to discover that students there are competitive! And graded on a curve! They work hard/play hard! And head off to stressful, high-paying jobs! This guy was a journalist for ten years before going to business school. Why were these newsflashes to him?

The HBS culture is a strong one, and it's pretty transparent. It's not for everyone, and that's fine. Why go there if it's not your cup of tea? I'm thinking this was more a failure of due diligence on his part than it was a failing of HBS.

With Round 1 deadlines right around the corner, this book is a good reminder to think hard about what kind of environment you want. People are seduced by name brands all the time, and the biggest, baddest name brands do have much to offer. There's nothing wrong with being brand-conscious, because brands have value, and they matter in the real world. (I doubt the author is suffering because he now has an MBA from HBS.) Still, if you're going to be miserable there, as this person obviously was, question whether you should go at all, and at a mininum make sure that the benefits (which can be considerable) outweigh that particular cost to you. And don't go there and then complain that HBS is... HBS.

Justice Blackmun may be famous for having authored the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, but he's also famous for the "sappy" 1972 baseball antitrust decision Flood v. Kuhn, which exempted baseball from antitrust laws just because baseball is, well, special:

[Flood v. Kuhn] begins with a hopelessly sentimental ode to baseball and a long list of best players who "sparked the diamond" through the national pastime's glorious history. It was so sappy that two justices in the majority refused to join that section of the decision.

How bad and sappy? The blurb above, from a Tony Mauro article about the decision in today's Legal Times, doesn't really capture the florid wretchedness of Blackmun's writing in this opinion, which deserves some kind of bad writing award (on top of legal reasoning so poor that it stands as an embarrassment to lawyers everywhere):

Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season.... [See entire list of players below.*] And one recalls the appropriate reference to the "World Serious," attributed to Ring Lardner, Sr.; Ernest L. Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"; the ring of "Tinker to Evers to Chance"; and all the other happenings, habits, and superstitions about and around baseball that made it the "national pastime" or, depending upon the point of view, "the great American tragedy."

But I digress.

So along came a controversial and best-selling book by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong called The Brethren (if you're applying to law school and haven't read it, you should, along with Jeffrey Toobin's forthcoming The Nine and Jan Crawford Greenburg's Supreme Conflict). The Brethren, which was overall very hostile to Blackmun, included a few sentences about the fact that Blackmun hadn't listed any black players in the first draft of his opinion and added them only at the behest of Thurgood Marshall. We were supposed to conclude that Blackmun was a bigot.

Turns out, "the story is false," according to Ross Davies in a recent interview with the Legal Times about an article he published in the current edition of the Journal of Supreme Court History entitled "A Tall Tale of The Brethren." (Ross is a professor at George Mason Law School, editor of the endlessly entertaining Green Bag, author of a new law school ranking called The Deadwood Report, and my former law review boss.) Ross's research shows that the infamous first draft omitting black players never existed.

Eagle-eyed readers of Ross's article might notice that this is not a battle of anonymous sources, as is so often the case, particularly with Woodward. The authors of The Brethren claimed to have relied on an actual draft of the purportedly all-white document, and they have yet to produce it. (See in particular pages 11-12 and 20-23 in Ross's article.)

What else can we take away from the Flood decision? As Brad Snyder, lawyer and author of a book about Curt Flood, explains in the Legal Times interview: "Even the best judges turn into pennant-waving schoolboys when they decide cases about sports."

 

* Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper, Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly, Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings, Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanela, Miller Huggins, Rube Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganess, Clark Griffith, Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson, Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones, Bob O'Farrell, Lefty O'Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiske, Roger Bresnahan, Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne, Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove.

For an unrelated discussion of Blackmun's list of players by law professor/baseball fan/former Hall of Fame scholar-in-residence, see this 2006 article by Roger Ian Abrams.