What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School Book Summary

Book Summary

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Brief Summary

While business schools are often very procedural in their teaching of entrepreneurial practices, there is only so much you can learn within the confines of a classroom. Certainly, theory is a critical component in contextualizing the art of buying and selling, but it is often not until theory can be applied that it is fully understood. What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School examines the pedagogical gaps in business instruction, encouraging students and new professionals to listen actively, do the unexpected, personalize communication, and effectively organize their time in order to achieve entrepreneurial success in our ever-changing society.

About the Author

Mark McCormack was born in 1930 in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Yale Law School where he earned a J.D. before serving in the United States Army.

Throughout his lifetime, McCormack held several influential roles including lawyer, sports agent, writer, and entrepreneur.

Most notably, he was the founder and CEO of IMG, an international management organization that works with sports figures and celebrities.

In addition to What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, McCormack wrote a few other books including The Terrible Truth About Lawyers.

He died in 2003 at age 72.

Topics

Management & Leadership

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Key Insights

Effectiveness in a business setting is about more than simply making a good sale. There is also a huge psychological component involved in any successful economic transaction, and leveraging your knowledge of the consumer’s true needs in order to best connect them with your product is key. As such, the role of active listening and communication in all aspects of buying and selling is essential for commercial success. Consumers want to hear your story...and they want to know that you hear theirs too.

Active Listening

As a society, we are regularly bombarded with numbers. From growth projections to user data statistics to other objective analytics, our economy operates, largely, by way of quantification.

Numbers can certainly be useful in addressing problems--on both an individual and a corporate level--but, in many cases, they fail to offer a complete picture of any situation.

Why?

Numbers don’t account for relationships.

Whether you are selling a product or buying one, it is critical that you understand the personality of the person or people you are working with.

Why do these people want the product?

What will it do for them?

How does it align with their individual/company goals?

These qualitative perspectives are all worth considering when establishing a business relationship.

While a prospective customer is often sharing one narrative with you, they could be offering a very different story to their colleagues around the water cooler later on.

For this reason, active listening is critical in determining what lies beneath the surface in any potential transaction. Connecting with buyers and sellers in business settings should extend far beyond the facts and figures. Ultimately, humans want to connect on a human level first. A sale can be built from there.

Let’s look at an example.

For years, Pepsi unsuccessfully pursued Burger King in an attempt to collaborate. Burger King, on the other hand, was already involved in an agreement with Coca-Cola.

So, what finally changed Burger King’s mind and convinced the company to switch to Pepsi?

Pepsi finally started listening. They realized that underneath the surface, what Burger King really wanted was a company that related to their positionality. When Pepsi took the approach in their pitch that both Burger King and Pepsi were ‘number two companies’ (as opposed to McDonald’s and Coca-Cola who were number one), Burger King made the switch to Pepsi’s products in an act of solidarity.

When you can relate to the customer and make a strong connection, it is much more likely you will make a sale.

Shifting Your Approach

When it comes to buyer and seller dynamics, we all have preconceptions about what we will see and experience, depending on context.

For instance, if you walk into a car dealership, you might expect a salesperson to aggressively push you towards buying a car. Perhaps this salesperson will share statistics and percentages regarding fuel efficiency, cost, and other vehicle features in order to encourage you to buy that company’s brand of car as opposed to another one.

But maybe, you just wanted to look around and casually consider some car-buying options, not with the end goal of making an immediate...