Snapshots From Hell

...Robinson is also successful in portraying business school as a place where most of the teachers lack any real passion for the marketplace, where those standing at the lectern each day emphatically reaffirm the accuracy of the statement: "Those who can, do...

...On an encouraging note, several of his high-powered classmates did make it big after graduating, while Robinson, after losing his job with Murdoch, made the wise decision to become a fellow at the Hoover Institution...

...We expect Democrats to think businessmen are thundering bores, but we certainly don't expect it of Republicans...

...Things didn't work out the way he planned...

...Snapshots From Hell, which recounts the torments of Robinson's first, most painful, year at Stanford, is interesting for two reasons, one the deliberate result of the author's efforts, the other an inadvertent byproduct of them...

...On the one hand, Robinson does a bang-up job as a wise-cracking tour guide through the bizarre universe of business schools, whose syllabuses seem to have almost no relevance to the real world...

...All of my intellectual chums on the right have an encyclopedic knowledge of politics, popular culture, and the media, just like all my egghead friends on the left...

...It was exciting work, challenging work, work that provided numerous psychological rewards, such as assisting the president in rebuilding America's confidence in itself, unleashing the entrepreneurial zeal of the American people, and demolishing the Communist system...

...Recounting his agony while attending such seminars as "Some Useful Derivative Theorems Joe Queenan is most recently the author of If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble (Hyperion...

...for Finding Derivative Functions Associated With Complicated Original Functions" and "The Geometric Interpretation of a Set of First Partial Derivatives as a Gradient Vector," Robinson portrays Stanford as a Parris Island of the mind, where each succeeding course serves but one function: to humiliate, degrade, and ultimately break the spirit of the student...

...But not long afterwards, Murdoch's empire started to founder and Robinson found himself out on the street, right beside a lot of other recently minted MBAs, including some of his classmates...

...I personally find these revelations quite disturbing because it confirms something I have long believed: that many on the left and right are united in a weird bipartisan disdain for the machinery that makes our society function...

...On the evidence of Snapshots From Hell, Robinson knows it...

...Robinson's Herculean efforts to master "decision trees," "influence diagrams," and "performance-outcome expectancies" are hilarious, as are his attempts to master the workings of the extrusion metals industry...

...T he unintended value of Snapshots From Hell is that it demonstrates, quite perplexingly, that many conservative Republicans are almost entirely ignorant of the workings of the business world, and more troubling still, aren't particularly interested in the engine that actually drives America...

...Snapshots From Hell is thus both diverting and unnerving at the same time...

...those who can't, teach...

...He will not regret that move: He is a talented writer, but he would have made a dud businessman, and the United States doesn't need any more dud businessmen...

...Here we have a graduate of Dartmouth and Oxford who spent four years writing speeches for the most pro-business-president since Calvin Coolidge, yet Robinson, by his own admission, had reached the age of 30 without ever hav, ing heard of a spreadsheet...

...Robinson did obtain his MBA degree, and did briefly land a job with one of Rupert Murdoch's myriad companies...

...Finally, Robinson explains the logic of MBA programs: They are intellectual gauntlets whose primary function is to determine how much suffering a young person is willing to endure, and how much money he is willing to part with, in order to get a really great job...

...But when it comes to the workings of the markets, few of them know as much as the worst reporter at Business Week...

...Unfortunately, there wasn't much money in it, so shortly before the end of Reagan's second term, Robinson decided to enroll in the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and get himself an MBA so he could become filthy rich and live happily ever after...

...Equally amusing is an exam question involving the great Dallas Cowboys and University of Pittsburgh running back Tony Dorsett, in which Robinson was asked to "calculate an appropriate measure of the central tendency of yards gained per carry in order to evaluate Dorsett's overall performance and justify the measure you have chosen...

...Moreover, at no point in the book does the reader ever get the feeling that the author has actually developed any passion for business while getting his MBA: his ideas on finance and marketing are pedestrian, even after a two-year MBA program, and SNAPSHOTS FROM HELL: THE MAKING OF AN MBA Peter Robinson Warner Books/284 pages /$22.95 reviewed by JOE QUEENAN 70 The American Spectator September 1994 his familiarity with the workings of the stock and bond markets is virtually nil...

...Still, it's scary to think that mere possession of an MBA was enough to win Robinson face-to-face interviews—and job offers—from the likes of Robert Maxwell, Steve Jobs, and Rupert Murdoch, despite the fact that he never really displayed any great passion for their enterprises...

...His description of a Microeconomics exam in which he was asked to determine how Snow White should allocate labor among the Seven Dwarves gives the reader a pretty good idea of how reality is perceived out there on the Left Coast...

...And Business Week has a lot of bad reporters...