To B Or Not To B

First Grade

I was the smartest kid in Miss Guardi’s first-grade class. I was the first one who knew all his ABCs; I could add and subtract any two numbers up to 10, and I was the best at reading.

Miss Guardi taught a combination class, first and second grade in one classroom. The second graders were big and smart. Miss Guardi was slender and smelled like a flower, like my mom. I tried really hard in school because my mom said she was proud of me, and Miss Guardi said I was almost ready for reading classes with the second graders. I liked being the smartest.

One day, there was a new kid in the first grade. Miss Guardi brought him in and said, “Class, this is Martin.” Martin was short and wore thick little glasses. When it was time for reading class, Martin said he had his own book. It was fat and had no pictures, except for the one on the front. Right away, Miss Guardi put Martin into the second-grade reading section.

Martin thought he was smarter than everyone else. The teacher always let him read out loud. When he finished, she said, “Thank you, Martin,” and Martin would smile like a little angel. I hated Martin.

One day on the playground, Martin and I were on the seesaw. You played with Martin only when everyone else was busy. And you got on the seesaw only when the second graders took all the swings, because the seesaw was boring. There was nothing to it. When I went up, Martin went down; when I went down, Martin went up. After a time, I got bored and just stopped. I just sat on the ground and left
Martin dangling in the air. Martin didn’t like this. He bounced up and down and kicked and screamed. Finally, he ordered me, “Let me down, stupid.” So I did. I hopped off the end of the seesaw, and Martin dropped to the asphalt like a dead weight.

Martin slammed into the ground, bounced off his seat and started to wail. The fall jarred his glasses off his head and when he stood up to find Miss Guardi, he couldn’t see. I went over to him and saw his glasses lying on the ground.

Miss Guardi called the school nurse and Martin’s mother and then my mom. Martin’s mom came right over, and she and Miss Guardi looked all around the seesaw and the merry-go-round for Martin’s glasses, but couldn’t find them anywhere.

When my mom came to school, she gave me a lecture. She said that what I had done was wrong. She said that could have hurt Martin’s back for a long, long time. She said that it was the worst thing I had done since I pushed Billy Farber’s face into the porcelain drinking fountain and chipped his front teeth.
We drove home silently in the station wagon. I climbed over the front seat into the back seat; then I climbed over the back seat and hid between the big brown grocery bags. When I was sure that my mom couldn’t see me, I reached into my pocket and pulled out Martin’s glasses.

Back home in my room, I put on Martin’s glasses and tried to read my older brother’s fifth-grade book, but they didn’t help me read better; everything was fuzzy. I told my brother about Martin and showed him the glasses. Don said that without his glasses, Martin couldn’t read. We decided that there was only one thing to do. We went out in the backyard and crushed them with a rock.

I was really looking forward to reading class the next day. I figured that when it was Martin’s turn to read, he’d make a lot of mistakes without his glasses, and kids would laugh at him. But Martin had a new pair of glasses, and he read as well as ever.

That day on the playground, Martin came up to me and said he wanted to be friends. I said okay, and asked him if he found his old glasses. I think Martin respected me because I taught him something he didn’t know. I taught Martin about gravity.

Second Grade

Martin and I were best friends all through second grade. I didn’t hate his guts anymore for being smarter than me. I was smarter at some things; Martin was smarter at others. Martin taught me about his chemistry set; I taught Martin how to sharpen a Popsicle stick into a dagger and threaten first graders. Martin showed me how to look up stuff in the encyclopedia; I taught Martin how to spit out meat loaf into a napkin and feed it to the dog. Once you got to know him, there was a touch of genius in Martin. It was Martin, after all, who figured out how to scare your mom by wrapping your head up in a plastic bag from the dry cleaners, lying down behind her when she was ironing and staying perfectly still.

First Year

Fall – A few years later, I was a first-year student at the Stanford Business School. On the first day school, I met all of my new friends. I had come to school early for a math-review course called “Track One,” for students with “non-traditional backgrounds.” At Stanford Business School, you have a non-traditional background if you didn’t study economics or engineering as an undergraduate; only a quarter of the class had been liberal arts majors. We went around the room introducing ourselves. One guy was a golf pro from Palos Verdes. Another had been in the Peace Corps in Africa. There was an art professor, a filmmaker, a Vietnamese refugee, a mountain climber, and a nurse. There were even a pair of pretty little dancers.

I sat up in the corner of the room, listening to everybody’s life stories. I knew right then that, for me, the GSB was going to be a piece of cake. While these other guys were off putting golf balls or smoking hashish, I’d been selling advertising for Capital Cities Communications. I knew how to make things happen in business. I was the top salesman. I had a stock option. My publisher liked me. The president of the company called me “Jimbo.”

By the end of Track One, the rest of the class had arrived in Palo Alto. We convened in the auditorium and listened to speeches about how we were the cream of the crop. The admissions director told us that we were an interesting and diverse group from all over the world, from West Point to South Vietnam. We had come from dozens of different disciplines, from nuclear engineering at Annapolis to social work in Alaska, and we were heading in just as many new directions. A lot of us planned to start our own businesses after school; we’d spelled entrepreneurship fifteen different ways on our applications. Most of us were Phi Beta Kappa or magna cum laude. Fewer than one out of ten applicants were admitted to Stanford.

After the speeches, I went to an orientation party in the school courtyard. I tried to talk to people. A short, funny-looking second-year guy named Franklin talked about his summer working for “Goldman Sachs” on “The Street.” I thought, “What street?” One girl told me that she worked at a place called “First Boston.” I asked how she liked Boston, and she told me she lived in New York. I was becoming disoriented. I started drinking more beer.

A mousy-looking second-year girl mentioned an engineering firm she used to manage. I tried to ignore her. She told me that with my background, business school was “gonna be a bitch.” Somebody else asked if I thought precious metals were still a good investment, so I showed him my gold-capped molar. He didn’t think this was funny, but he laughed when a second-year student made a crack about beer demand being “inelastic.” Now I was really starting to worry.

As I looked around for a nurse or a dancer, I couldn’t help overhearing a computer scientist I’ll call Arthur. He was balding and had a starched white shirt with a gold Cross pen in the pocket. He said that he worked in “P.C. board design.” I told him I had heard of the IBM PC and he corrected me instantly. He worked on “programmable control boards, not personal computers.” “OK,” I thought. “P.C.s. Not PCs.”

Arthur and a banker type got talking about the similarities between studying financial analysis and studying electrical engineering, about Wall Street, “artificial intelligence,” “going public” and “puts and calls.” They sounded like somebody’s dad. I poured myself another beer and leaned on a picnic table. “My god,” I thought, “I’m adrift in a sea of Martins.”

School began, and I was behind from the start. On the first day my accounting professor assigned Chapter Six; we were supposed to have studied the first five chapters of Financial Accounting over the summer, but I was still on Chapter Two.

Before long, we were talking about the probabilities of wet and dry oil-well holes in Decision Making class, supply and demand of kiwi fruit in Microeconomics, optimizing knife and fork production in Computers class, what was a norm and what was a status in Organizational Behavior and, in Financial Accounting, whether something in inventory should go out first if it came in last. I was lost and I was scared. Everyone seemed to know what was going on except me. In each class, the professor would ask if there were any questions. I was too scared to raise my hand. Where would I begin? What would I ask: “Why am I here?”

To me, the course work was hopelessly abstract. The theme was management as science. Price, production, probabilities, and personnel were variables to be optimized. The tools of the trade were curves, computer models, and calculators to “crunch numbers.” I couldn’t picture a living, breathing company using these methods. My facility had always been with words, not data. My numbers wouldn’t crunch. They were like cereal that had been in the milk too long.

To add to my misery, Arthur was in all five of my classes. When a professor asked a particularly hard question, Arthur would wait until a few classmates had gotten it wrong, then raise his hand high, smile to himself, answer correctly, and look around the room.

Once, after class, I asked him how he could absorb all the material so well. Arthur said that he’d been planning for business school since his late teens, and that between college and his engineering work, he’d had a lot of the material before. Besides, he said, “It’s pretty intuitive stuff, don’t you think?”

“Not to me. Arthur. I was an English major.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t be here.”

Arthur was beginning to get on my nerves.

My instinct was either to quit and get my money back, or pull through by working as hard as possible. The dean’s secretary said that it was too late to get my money back. I hadn’t quit anything since Hebrew school, and by now my ego was involved. I resolved to bust my ass, do every scrap of assigned work, ace my midterm exams, and graduate in the top ten percent of the class as what is called “an Arjay Miller Scholar.”

I began a fitness and studying regimen. I would drive home from school, put a frozen lasagna or beef stroganoff in the oven, stretch, run twenty-five minutes, make sure that my meal was golden brown and crispy, eat, brush my teeth and study. I’d study from 6:30 until about 11:30. When I stopped being alert, I’d climb into bed and read Organizational Behavior until it put me to sleep.

In the mornings I’d wake up at 6:45 and try to review my homework answers before my 8 o’clock class. I started drinking coffee for the first time. I bought a spill-proof cup, with an extra-wide base, designed for sailboats, so I could drink coffee in the car as well as at home and in class.

I wasn’t alone: the nurse started chain-smoking cigarettes. The golf pro lost his tan.

Midterms were conveniently scheduled back-to-back, five in a row. Each test was four hours long. Accounting was the last.

The night before Accounting, I studied until almost midnight, then was simply too exhausted to continue. I climbed into bed, but couldn’t sleep. I thrashed around for three hours, then turned on the TV at 3 a.m. and followed along with a lady doing yoga. I was still too nervous to sleep. It was 4 a.m. I got out of bed and drank two hefty shots of Jack Daniels.

Now I was restless and drunk. I finally dozed off around 5 a.m. My alarm went off at 7 a.m. On the drive to school I realized was still a little drunk. I went to the cafeteria and bought three cold Cokes. I drank one immediately and two during the exam. Halfway through the test, I had to pee really bad.

I scurried out of the classroom. The halls were empty, and it occurred to me that I could save a couple of minutes using the women’s restroom, which was closer. On my way out of the cubicle, I ran into that mousey second-year student who has told me B-School would be a bitch. Startled, she asked, “What are you doing here?” “Shitting bricks,” I replied.

A few days later, I got my midterms back. Except for Organizational Behavior, no two of my scores added up to more than 100 percent. My Accounting score was in the bottom ten percent of the class. It was the first time in my life I had ever flunked.

Winter – I muddled through the rest of fall quarter and passed all of my classes. But winter quarter brought a whole new set of challenges, the job hunt. I realized that this was an area in which I would naturally excel. Given my sales experience and general interpersonal charm, I’d be great in job interviews and get any job I wanted. The only question was, which job did I want?

Investment banks and management consulting firms are traditionally the most aggressive recruiters of Stanford Business School students. They pay up to $1,600 per week for the summer and $100,000 full time. Because of their popularity with students, they can afford to be quite selective, interviewing hundreds of students and hiring half a dozen. For a first-year student, great prestige is attached to landing one of these jobs for the summer. Almost everyone tried, even the dancers, the golf pro, and the nurse.

A sort of herd mentality took hold as interview season began, but I tried to remain above it all. I have always considered myself my own man, and I viewed the choice of vocation as a highly individual matter. I looked into my soul and meditated on the myriad career possibilities made available by the GSB. I decided I wanted to be either a management consultant or an investment banker.

The first step was to go to a luncheon sponsored by the firm, learn about the company and ask intelligent questions. For my first, I chose Goldman Sachs. I got there early, sat right in the front row, listened actively and tried to establish eye contact with the Goldman recruiter named Joe Wender. Arthur was there too, taking notes with his gold Cross pen in a little leather Executive Planner.

Wender put a slide on the overhead, outlining Goldman’s “five P’s.” He said that you could work at Goldman and be a Partner, be Pre-eminent, have good Principles and Perform Profitably all at once. It sounded great.

I prepared intensely for my Goldman interview. I borrowed a Wall Street Journal and read it all morning. I photocopied an article from Institutional Investor and memorized the names of Goldman’s two chairmen, John and John. My interview started off very well: the guy from Goldman Sachs shook my hand and said that it was good to see me. I followed up forcefully with, “It’s good to be here.” But then I ran into trouble: he asked me why I wanted to work for Goldman Sachs. I said that was interested in what they do. He asked, “What do we do?” I told him that they got people to lend money to their friends, that they were a partnership and lived in New York, near Chinatown.

He sensed that maybe I wasn’t Goldman material, and asked, “What subjects interest you most here at school?”

“Economics.”

“Ok, what’s the GNP?”

“That’s the Gross National Product.”

“Yeah, right. What is the Gross National Product?”

“Oh, you want a number. Okay, how about $1 trillion?”

“You’re off by $2 trillion.”

“In which direction?”

He didn’t find me amusing, and we were both feeling awkward, so he gave me one I could handle: “Describe yourself at Goldman in five years.”

“I’ll be 33.”

I got the rejection letter the next day. I had similar experiences with all the major investment banks and consulting firms. Near the end of winter quarter, I was walking out to my car, and there was Arthur standing right in the middle of a handicapped-parking space, boasting to another guy about all his job offers. I wanted to smash his glasses with a rock.

Spring – Spring quarter my luck started to change. Some friends asked me if I wanted to be an editor of the business school newspaper, so I said “sure.” I went to an interview with The New York Times, and the guy asked, “What do you do that is noteworthy at school?” I said, “I’m editor of the newspaper,” and he said, “Why don’t you come to work for us for the summer?”

School became easier as well. My classes were now taught almost entirely by the case method. Each case described the dilemmas of a real company with actual business problems. We prepared and discussed each case at length, usually from the perspective of the chief executive officer.

In class, we assumed the role of top management, and argued about whether Canada Dry should position itself as a soda or a mixer, whether GE should stay in the tissue paper business, or the wisdom of Ciba-Geigy’s investment in solid air fresheners. What could be more fun than to pretend to be the head of a Fortune 500 company all day? In first grade we called it “playing make believe.”

In addition to individual class preparation, we were instructed to form groups of four or five students to work on projects too complex to handle alone. Now a premium was placed on our skills as team players and organizers. Stanford’s message was now that business is interpersonal communications. Management is an art as well as a science. For the first time, I felt as if I might be good at something in business school.

But springtime was not all pleasant: Arthur was in three of my classes. On those rare occasions when I did have something to say, Arthur inevitably beat me to the punch. In one class, to my dismay, Arthur sat directly in front of me. The classroom was an amphitheater, so my desk was three or four feet above Arthur’s. Now when he raised his hand, it was right in my face. When I was bored in class, I tried to land tiny paper airplanes and spitballs on Arthur’s bald spot.

Toward the end of spring term, our class put on the annual “first year production,” a satire of GSB life. The student actors parodied other students as well as professors. The impersonation of Arthur was hard to miss: the actor waved his hand in the air for the entire skit. He hopped up and down in his chair, saying, “I know, I know” and “Pick me, pick me.”

It was funny but cruel. I was sitting in the audience a few feet from Arthur, while 350 people laughed at him. He looked as embarrassed as if he’d suddenly discovered he was wearing no clothes. He was trying to smile, but looked like he wanted to cry.

Spring term ended, and we all flew off to our summer jobs. On the plane on the way to New York, I sipped my coffee, looked out the window and thought. What I had done to Martin, Stanford had done to me. And I think it was intentional in both cases.

Maybe the first year’s biggest value was that it was humiliating. Stanford gave a group of people, used to doing all their work, more work than they could possibly do. A group of star achievers had had their noses rubbed in their deficiencies for a year. Everyone I knew was made to feel like a fool on some level. Everyone, including Arthur.

Second Year

The first day of my second year of business school, I got into line behind Arthur in the cafeteria. I asked him how the summer was at Goldman Sachs and he said something about “bulls.” So I said, “I was sorry to see you made fun of that way last year, Arthur.”

“I was sorry I acted like such an asshole, Jim.”

It was the first time he called me “Jim” instead of “you.” We’ve been friends ever since.

As second-year students, we came back to Stanford feeling experienced and savvy. The first-years looked scared and naïve, like puppies about to get spanked. We second-years were the veterans, the older brothers, the big kids on the block.

With all of our required courses behind us, we were free to work on anything we wanted. Our projects often took the form of consulting work for local companies. Arthur and I teamed up to write business plans for Silicon Valley start-ups. We made a great team. Arthur crunched the numbers, and I translated them into English. Arthur prepared the graphs and bar charts, I wrote the text and presented it to the client. Arthur taught me how to use an IBM PC to produce pro forma financial statements. I taught Arthur how to flirt with waitresses at the all-night diner.

If first year was boot camp, second year was day camp. While there was still a great deal of work to do, we were more efficient, applying the basics we’d learned in the first year. The nurse cut down on cigarettes. I got better at tennis, stocked the refrigerator in the school newspaper office with beer, and stopped drinking coffee almost altogether.

The golf pro decided that, in his experience, what Stanford business students needed was more physical contact. He founded the Hug Club, requiring “proof of 20 hugs” for membership. He sold “Dare to Hug” T-shirts and buttons reading “Born to Hug” and “I’m a Hugaholic.” On his first day in business, he had more than 100 students in the B-school courtyard, hugging and signing one another’s Hug Cards. Channel 7 sent a TV crew a few weeks later, to capture the sight, while it lasted, of America’s future business leaders hugging away.

The second year was as pragmatic as the first year was theoretical. We had courses with names like “Negotiations and Intervention,” “Power and Politics in Organizations,” “Creativity in Business,” and “Interpersonal Dynamics,” known as “Touchy-Feely.” “Touchy-Feely” was one of the most popular courses at Stanford. Ostensibly designed to improve our understanding of how we’re perceived, and so make us better managers, the course gave students who’d all been through an intense two years the chance to say what they really thought of one another.

Throughout it all, we were being told by our professors, our peers and visiting CEOs, “You are the future leaders of American business. You are the best and the brightest. You can accomplish whatever you want to accomplish.” And the message came through in the recruitment process, Students were wined and dined, and were courted with plane trips for their families, audiences with CEOs and salary offers that averaged $80,000 and went as high as $120,000.

The experience left no one unchanged. The nurse, the mountain climber, the nuclear engineer, and one of the dancers signed on to become investment bankers. The golf pro and the West Point graduate became real estate salesmen. The Peace Corps volunteer became a highly paid “development consultant.” After “Touchy-Feely” class, Arthur decided that Wall Street wasn’t “mellow enough,” and, like the other dancer and the social worker, he became a management consultant.

Not everyone went into investment banking, real estate, and consulting. The filmmaker went back to Hollywood. The Vietnamese refugee landed a job in the White House. The art professor is marketing electronic teddy bears. But we were a much more homogeneous group now than we were two years before. Six students went to work for the same division of General Mills. Though several dozen signed up for Stanford’s Public Management Program, only five or six students completed it. Only a handful of “entrepreneurs” thought it wise to start their own businesses.

Still, I have to think that Stanford didn’t mold us so much as we molded ourselves. Stanford deliberately sought the unusual, the non-traditional. But what an Army lieutenant and a choreographer had in common was a driving need to excel. The GSB admitted people who had succeeded at what they’d done before and now wanted to jump a higher hurdle. We redefined success in terms of money, prestige, and acceptance at the country’s top packaged-goods, real-estate development, investment banking, and consulting firms.

As usual, I found it hard to remain immune to envy of my friends’ accomplishments. When I told a colleague about my $62,000 job offer from a New York magazine publisher, she asked, “That’s it? Aren’t they paying you a signing bonus or anything?” Her consulting firm offered $95,000 plus $10,000 for a commitment early in the year. Sixty-two thousand dollars used to sound like a lot of money.

Maybe it’s the raw strength of our expectations that makes Stanford MBAs so successful in the marketplace. We may have felt stupid and incompetent, but that was a long time ago. What the first year of Stanford Business School took out of the ego, the second year gave back in spades. So for now we’re back at the top again, sitting like Martin, high up on the seesaw, with a view of the whole playground.