Cost of one minute at HBS

Today was my last day of first year cases at HBS and we begin our finals on Thursday. There are so many takeaways to write about, it's difficult to know where to begin and I doubt I will even scratch the surface. It's been an incredible year.

One of the skills many students learn and/or improve thanks to the case method is oral communication since half of one's class grade is based on class participation. There are about 30 cases per course, and the average student speaks every other case per class, so around 15 comments per semester for each student per class (though it probably varies from 10-20).

This means that the professor determines half of your grade on an average of 15 comments over the period of 3.5 months. That's not an incredibly deep well of information to help differentiate 94 highly talented students. It's for this reason that oral communication is so important. One must learn to briefly and persuasively speak in front of a crowd if he or she is to excel. Most class comments last under a minute, and more often they are only a few sentences. I therefore think this is an excellent laboratory to hone persuasive public speaking, and I firmly believe this is a key skill for business leaders. Even if one is great at giving public speeches, knowing how to inject 30 seconds of persuasive wisdom in the proper context is a different story and a different challenge. Preparation can also only go so far, because to be effective, one has to comment "in the flow" of the discussion, and it's difficult to really prepare for all permutations of arguments that will emerge. A terrible comment is one that was brilliantly prepared the night before and presented totally out of context of the comment preceding it.

Another way to analyze how important one can take his/her class comments is to compute how much other people are paying to hear you speak.

HBS Class of 2012 tuition is $48,600. There are approximately 30 cases per course, and 10 courses in the first year, so 300 total cases. Assuming that the entire tuition goes towards a pure learning environment, that means we pay $48,600/330 or $162 per case. This doesn't include $4,850 in support fees which goes toward buying the physical cases themselves and other support material.

Much of the value of being at HBS is captured outside of the classroom through networking, recruiting, and the lifetime value of brand itself. However, let's make the extreme assumption for a moment that all of the tuition cost is captured in its entirety during the actual HBS class hours. Each case is taught for exactly 80 minutes, so one pays roughly $2 for every minute of an HBS class. There are 94 students in my section, so if you decide to speak for one minute, other students are effectively paying $186 for every minute to hear you speak. When I presented this analysis to some of my classmates at the start of the year, they began taking their comments much more seriously.

One of my personal lessons was that if you have 5 minutes of absolutely fantastic points to make, and you only have 2 minutes to do it in, you shouldn't give the same 5 minute speech but at 2.5x speed. Similarly if you only have 1 minute, one shouldn't simply cut out half the speech and rush as much as possible into one minute. One has to tailor all of his comments to fit the format (length) and obviously the audience. One may feel like he has 3-4 amazingly brilliant points to make to support an argument, but he can actually be more persuasive if instead of rushing through them he makes a single overarching comment that captures the greatest impact. Students have to sometimes get over the desire to "hear themselves talk" in order to actually be more effective.

This is indeed an art form. The case method is therefore one of the highlights of my HBS experience thus far.