Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/63421
FEVER Tulip corporation. Business schools can help students identify the syndromes that indicate a company is offering fertile ground for trouble. Business incompetence can bloom even at the most prestigious A few years ago, a top Harvard professor addressed a gathering of business school deans in The Netherlands. He noted that Harvard's top MBAs were no longer joining Wall Street but setting up dot-com companies and starting to make their for- tunes while still at college. Partway through the talk, he asked the audience, "What do you think?" "Tulips," someone responded. The audience laughed, and the chairperson of by John Saunders illustrations by David Clark the event explained the tulip mania frenzy that engulfed Holland between 1634 and1637. So desperate were investors for the new bulbs that they were spend- ing thousands of dollars on tulip futures—on items that did not actually exist. The parallels between that situation and the dot-com mania were obvious. Investing in nonexistent products and blindly following an interested in raising funds from 3i. I asked the 3i exec what signs she looked for to indicate that a company might not be worth funding. She said, "I look for all the signs that indicate people are playing at business, not working at it. A flashy building with ego-sized offices and arty communal areas. Excessive executive perks, manicured gardens, and flags—loads of flags." exciting new market are far from being the only mistakes business owners make. Recently, I was driving to a dot-com company with an executive from the venture capital firm 3i. The dot-com was 46 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002