The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald (HarperBusiness, £25)
On the Harvard Business School (HBS) website, for the modest outlay of $8.95, you can download a case study entitled The Royal Bank of Scotland: Masters of Integration. Coauthored in 2003 by Nitin Nohria, the current Dean of the School, it is larded with extravagant praise for the management team of the time. If you are prepared to double your money you can read a similarly enthusiastic companion piece about RBS’s human resources management system.
Somehow I doubt whether they are to be found on the current curriculum at Harvard, in spite of their eminent authorship. And I hope that they are not much downloaded by strategy professors at those many schools that adopt and adapt HBS material—except for use as cautionary tales of overreach. On that score, though, they are trumped by a breathlessly enthusiastic London Business School case from 2004 entitled RBS: The Strategy of Not Having a Strategy, which, it turns out, was the secret of the bank’s “success” at the time.