Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA

A funny and honest day-to-day journal from a former presidential speechwriter chronicles his progress through Stanford University in pursuit of an MBA degree, offering a clear picture of the experience of attending business school.

After six years as a White House speechwriter for Reagan and Bush, Robinson enrolled at Stanford Business School, wrestled for two years in perpetual exhaustion with often incomprehensible mathematical, organization and marketing concepts and, upon earning his MBA "union card for yuppies," interviewed in the communications world of Robert Maxwell, Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch (who hired him for a brief stint). In the tradition of Scott Turow's One L for potential students who are curious about Harvard Law School, the author sets out with humor and perception to answer the question that no business school catalogue does: What is business school like? Then Robinson dismisses the value of an MBA degree in the economic downturn after the fat '80s; for him the degree did not pay off as a "straight and easy road to riches." Robinson explains: "Today I'm back to being what I was before I went to business school, a writer." BOMC and Fortune Book Club alternates.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A funny and frenetic account of Robinson's crucial first year in Stanford's MBA program, offering an education in itself as well as a cautionary tale. Stanford's atypical MBA program combines Harvard's case-study approach and Chicago's business theory but has a much more diverse, laid-back student body. With graduate work at Oxford and a career as a White House speech writer behind him, Robinson was a ``poet''- -in Stanford lingo, accepted to add variety to the management consultants and number crunchers. Like most of his peers in 1988, his motive for getting an MBA (which one professor called a ``yuppie union card'') was to secure an insurance policy for a lucrative career as an investment banker, financial consultant, or the like. Robinson found himself struggling to understand not only supply-and-demand curves, but also decision trees and influence diagrams. He also discovered his classmates' appalling ignorance of economic philosophy, whether Adam Smith or Karl Marx, and the persistence of gender issues in the B-school's race-blind meritocracy. His book is an album of late-night studying, random ``cold calls'' by professors in class, impossible exams, competition, and camaraderie. Robinson got a job with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, from which he was fired less than a year later in the recession. His peers likewise graduated to diminished expectations, but all got the credentials and contacts to improve their careers or change their lives. Todays business schools, with enrollments declining, have begun to expand their programs' ties to real business experience and to balance professors' teaching responsibilities with their research, but these problems are beyond the scope of Robinson's own vivid experience. Not the ultimate B-school survival guide, but a genial description of everything about getting an MBA that you wanted to know but were afraid to find out. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.