It is so easy to be distracted by constant flow of news and views in wealth management that more long-term issues can sometimes get overlooked. Nowhere is this more so than in the crucial area of educating future wealth professionals.

The last time I wrote about post-graduate training for wealth managers, the reaction was strong. We published a roundup in January of some of the world’s most prominent post-graduate training schemes for wealth managers around the world and I was struck at the large number of clicks on the story. (To view the item, click here). Several readers came forward with new courses that had not been included in the original article. This is a subject to which I intend to return on a regular basis. 

And the response naturally got me interested in the sort of ideas and disciplines which are taught in the world’s leading business schools. (I haven’t done an MBA myself). And they don’t come much more impressive than the Harvard Business School. In consequence, yours truly was looking forward to reading Emily Chan’s Harvard Business School Confidential, a 230-page rapid tour through the kind of subjects and issues that HBS entrants are confronted with. I was interested to know what anyone interested in this wealth management industry could glean from the book. In general, I did learn some valuable insights but the book also contained some shortcomings, in my view.

Across its 15 chapters, Chan covers fields such as investment, negotiation and networking skills (both of clear relevance to any private banker); operations (process, human resources, marketing, sales and finance), and strategy. Some of what she writes might appear self-evident to many of this publication’s readers – networking is a useful skill to have and an obvious way to meet clients and nurture contacts; I also thought some of the points she made about strategy and how to define it were insightful, if perhaps a bit too brief.

The segments on operations were a fast summary of HBS thinking and again, I found them to be pretty insightful. I liked her discussion of what good strategy is – she refers, for example, to the “Porter Five Forces” approach in judging the attractiveness of an industry, as devised by Professor Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School, an approach used in business schools worldwide. I would be interested to see whether this is used, and how, by strategists at wealth management firms looking to enter a new field. Another useful segment was about the “80/20” rule as developed by the French economist Wilfred Pareto (1848-1923). He discovered that on the basis of wide observation, a small fraction of the number of elements (about 20 per cent) usually accounts for a large fraction (around 80 per cent) of the effect. If this rule is indeed correct, it might explain why, for example, banks are increasingly focusing attention on wealth management as a growth sector – a relatively small chunk of the global population holds a large share of global wealth, and so on.

But although the book’s general insights can be applied, in the most general sense, to wealth management, this book is going to have only a fairly limited relevance. One problem is that this book did not go into any industrial or service sector in any depth. There was hardly anything in here about banking and although it got a fleeting mention, there was little reflection on some of the lessons of the recent credit crunch (admittedly, the book was published in 2009).

I was also a bit concerned at the chapter on investments. Chan spends a bit of time talking about how to make money in real estate. In fairness, she does warn of the dangers of over-leverage, but in general this book looks and feels as if it was written long before the full horrors of the sub-prime housing meltdown in the US and abroad took hold.

Another, perhaps slight problem with this book is that it is clearly written for a US-based audience. Sure, it does urge on readers the case for studying plenty of foreign languages – very wise at a time, for example, when nations such as China are in the economic ascendant. But Chan also writes with a shudder on how her accent – a mixture of British, Californian and Chinese – meant that she did not speak “like an American” and hence was a drag on her career prospects in the US. She wrote that she even thought about complaining about the remarks made at her but eventually decided to speak “like an American”. I am not sure what a British student at a US business school, hoping to work in North America, would make of that! I know of several expats working in North America in the wealth management world, and their "foreign-ness" has not held them back.

Such points aside, as a guide to the general thinking of the Harvard Business School and its methods, this is not a bad introduction, and those thinking of going there can learn some useful points from it. As for those looking at the value of post-grad courses in wealth management, however, we await a guide. This is a field that deserves its own study.