In The Kingdom Of Coal Book

A nice little memoir of the author's time spent studying for a Harvard MBA before the recent financial crash.

The author's experiences are for me summed up by two anecdotes in particular. The teaching of leveraging up a company with debt not as a strategy that can be pursued in certain circumstances but as a universally right answer and appropriate course of action; and the course taken jointly with the Kennedy School taught by Michael Porter when the MBA approach of being profit focused runs up against doing what is best for a business environment, the economy as a whole and the society that has to endure the consequences. And then you think that the graduates on release from captivity will roam free for up to forty years with attitudes more appropriate to an earlier age of golden entrepreneurship practised extensively throughout the Spanish Main.

However when it turns out that many of the wealthier students bought expensive new cars in order to reduce the cash in their current accounts to qualify for hardship funds (or equivalents thereof) that the school is only reflecting the values of the society in which it operates.

Judging by the teaching and studying style alone those values look to me to be horrific, with the curve grading and marks awarded for performance in class. No space here for contemplation and the development of knowledge, just a struggle to reach the top quartile. It is a long way from the author's folk memory of his Grandmother running a cinema in Rangoon. You get a sense of how it is a manner of study that encourages the brash, the arrogant, the certain, and the loud.

When in pursuit of being brash, arrogant and loud one student gets drunk and urinates on their neighbours door they apologise, apparently unironically, by saying that their moral compass had gone haywire resulting in a regrettable property damage incident. This they are obliged to put in writing and send out to the whole student body. A form of public penance that makes me think of Maoist China, or perhaps some peculiarly intense church in which the believers strives to be considered to be among the Elect. At the same time given that former US President Bush II was a graduate it puts some political discourse in a different light.

Considering the inputs the wonder is that things aren't considerably worse than they appear to be at present. But on an optimistic note perhaps the worst is still to come.

Some mild references to business concepts are included, but the faint hearted need not be frightened of them, this is an engaging and readable memoir.