This was pretty much what I expected it to be, if not a little less still. Mark H. McCormack’s What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School is a small, relatively surface level collection of business “street smarts” and common sense with a lot of golf related anecdotes from his own business IMG between the 1960s and 1990s in the form of a paragraph or two under each subheading. As such, some of the specificities simply no longer apply, whereas the vast majority of the tips and tricks are quite generic and commonsensical, particularly if one has read any other business or leadership books, which all seem to somewhat converge on similar points.

That being said, it can be a good overview of the business self-help space for someone who has not yet read the genre at all. There are also some decent reminders for more seasoned readers of the genre as well, such as “Once You’ve Sold, Shut Up” as, by definition, you cannot improve the situation anymore and so the only thing you can do is to undermine the effort one way or another. “Charge For Your Expertise” is a classic, which refers to factoring in and reminding your clients of all the costs from hiring and research to developing connections and the simple trial and error that they would have to incur in order to do everything themselves. It is relatively obvious but always very good to remember so that you can frame negotiations the right way. “Be Smart Enough To Know When You’re Lucky” and “Learn To Say No Even When It Hurts” were a couple others that resonated for me, but as already mentioned, most of them were delivered more as food-for-thought rather than in-depth case-studies with robust reasoning and research.

Another relatively subtle thing really dating the book back for me by a lot was the author’s need to explicitly specify the gender of his clients when they were women, even when that added nothing whatsoever to the actual point, and automatically referring to every executive position with male pronouns. Sure, that is how it largely was back in the day but the frequency at which these came up in the book had me lightly chuckling every now and then.

Furthermore, I would characterize the approach of the book as quite explicitly endorsing playing within-the-box. It is likely what most people should do, because why would we otherwise design and create such boxes, but, at least by modern standards, you’re not going to find any too radical ideas here. Nevertheless, it is a light read and worth skimming through at least the chapter titles if you have never touched a business book previously. If you have, do not expect to find anything new, let alone any more depth.