First Taste of Harvard Business School

Last week I took my first B-school class ever—at Harvard Business school—my first sip towards quenching my curiosity about what lies behind the walls of the revered HBS classes. I was pleasantly surprised!

One recurring feature about my previous coursework experience at tech schools—IIT Bombay, USC, and even Harvard—has been that the course cover tends to sound more attractive than the actual content. Let me clarify and emphasize that this is simply a plain observation and not intended to be a pejorative depiction of tech courses. The content (quite understandably) can’t take a deep dive into the really cool parts of the course right off the bat. As a result, course titles always seem to appear very enticing from a distance, but the actual content often requires first wading through some recondite math or grappling with some very involved prerequisite concepts, before getting to striking distance from the really cool parts of the course. For example, when I knew nothing about Electrical Engineering, I took this course on “Electronic Devices and Circuits” at IIT Bombay — expecting to learn everything about how all these cool electronic gadgets are wired up and how their constituent chips and microprocessors work— but to my dismay, the course was really all about esoteric semiconductor physics and boring pn junction equations. 

At HBS this semester, I’ve enrolled myself for a course with a similar tantalizing course title, “Negotiation (Intensive)”. Just like I used to be curious to see if MS Dhoni would manage to live up to his gigantic reputation every time he stepped out to bat in recent times, I was wondering what pearls of wisdom HBS will put on offer with this course to match up to the Harvard brand. 

Going in with this mindset, I had no idea what to expect, but my best guess would have been to be greeted by a barrage of business jargon. To my astonishment, the lessons taught in class seemed to be based purely on common sense and simple arithmetic instead, and offered other smart life-hacks ready to be lifted and plugged into my daily life. There was no math or business detour and no jargon (or so I think; if there was any jargon, my brain likely didn’t catch that).

My first negotiation simulation—based off of a real-world case—was truly an immersive experience. I was required to play the role of the president of a sub-division of a company and negotiate with the president of another sub-division of the same company. As I discovered later during our analysis, negotiation is so much more than haggling over who gets the bigger piece of the pie—it is largely about creating the biggest possible pie for the two (or more) parties to share.

While a sample size of 2 classes is obviously inadequate to form conclusions, the first impressions for sure seem very promising. I’m sure there is a whole lot more to MBA and B-school in general, looking at all my smart friends who have had to grind their way through their MBA. I’m hoping this course continues to be just as exciting and sculpts out of me, the master negotiator that I’ve always admired and wanted to be.

PS. The picture is only a red herring; the class was on zoom and this picture was taken a couple of months ago when I was taking a random walk around Boston and ended up on the business school campus somehow.