It was one quiet afternoon that my demanding, hideously greedy, toothless, self obsessed, bug eyed, double-crossing boss, straight from the Gordon Gekko Greed is Good school of life said something to me that amazes me to this day...

Back in the late 1990s the nameless Investment Bank that I worked for was in the throes of brain washing me. I did my best to muddle through, not really sure what the big plan or the big picture was. In time I slowly came to terms with the job and figured out how to negotiate the webs of intrigue (to be honest I wasn’t really aware of them, I was more of a ‘wet behind the ears’ eegit so my ignorance was bliss).

I was stationed on the Treasury desk, also known as the Money desk; so I suppose it was my first on-the-job training in money.

The newbies were always the ones to be driven to the bone and into the ground. So they were tough times, limited rewards and most nights I didn’t leave the desk until 10pm having but struggling away since the standard 7am start.And naturally I had an irrational hatred of my boss.

It was one quiet afternoon that my demanding, hideously greedy, toothless, self obsessed, bug eyed, double-crossing boss straight from the Gordon Gekko Greed is Good school of life said something to me that was highly out of character and that amazes me to this day:

“Joe, we’re sending you to the Associate Training Programme in New York for the Summer”.

I almost choked on my Assam Tea (I had a streak of pretension, I’m now back on builder’s tea).

I had just won the national lottery. I had been given the dream ticket. I had just woken up thinking it was Monday morning, when it was in fact a Saturday morning. Yes, it was that kind of feeling.

Of course my boss imagined that I was aglow with delight at the chance I had been given to rub shoulders with the big cheeses of one of the world’s largest investment banks, to listen to and learn from some of the wisest economic and financial minds (look what they weren’t able to predict….where do I start?), to learn about amazing new financial derivative products like CDOs, MBSs and whatever financial acronym you’re having yourself.

Yes I’m sure my boss expected me to return to London at the end of 4 months of intensive brain training, networking, learning and innovating, brimful of money making ideas.

However all I could think of were my own five letters:

P- A - R - T - Y

I had a free apartment on Central Park for 3 months, I had per diem expenses, and I had the call of Manhattan on my doorstep. Whitney Huston lived upstairs.

Friends and family visited. Friends and family - that I never thought I had - visited. And any day we didn’t have a ‘P - A - R - T - Y‘, well then we just opted to have a ‘p - a - r - t - y’ instead.

So in a word, I coped.

There were downsides though. I had to attend MBA type business school every day from 8.30am to 6pm.

And I had exams, lots of exams, and I had to do group projects, lots of group projects.

This was where I first encountered the phenomenon that is the fresh faced, perma smiled, MBA graduate from many of the top tier business schools; Yale, Harvard, Wharton, Chicago, yadayadayada.

In a word…’urghhh’.

They brought the art of brown nosing to new heights, or should that be new depths.

Each lecture would typically last 3 hours. The MBA grads made it feel like five hours. There was a lazy-eyed gentleman by the name of Will who sat next to me. You couldn‘t choose your seats... Will typically asked 73 questions per lecture:

“Excuse me Professor, I was just wondering what your thoughts are on the current Fed Funds Rate”

“Excuse me Professor, I was keen to know your thoughts on the North American Free Trade Agreement”

“Excuse me Professor, I read with great interest today that Archie Mitchell is dead. I was wondering what were your thoughts on that?”

Will was a numbskull numchuck (technical term). He didn’t know an awful lot, and having worked on a couple of group projects with him, I became convinced of that fact.

But he knew one crucial thing. He knew the system. He knew that if he contributed to class discussions (or alternatively asked inane questions that provoked class discussions) then he would be handsomely evaluated by the course assessors (two of whom permanently sat in the classes watching us and taking notes on us as if we were Lab Monkeys).

I also learned from the dialogue and behaviour in group projects that Will and his other MBA cohorts would happily have clambered over the dead bodies of their work peers in order to answer their bosses’ phone.

You see these Lab Monkeys were career driven from birth.

The most important thing in life to these people (there were about 15 in my class of 35, and I have met many of the type since) was the CV, or the Resumé. That was the golden ticket, so you had to make constant efforts to tart it up.

Get a perfect 4.0 SAT grade point average. Learn a second, or a third language. Get into the right Business school. Play lacrosse, field hockey, golf, jujitsu, chess. Have the words, problem solver, leadership and team player pepper all over the document.

That’s all fine, but there were so many androids that ticked those boxes that you had to try to stand out.

So they need better contacts, better networks, better initiatives.

They need to set up investment clubs - with all proceeds going towards helping the sick and the needy and the underprivileged, and victims of Botox operations gone wrong. After set up and printing costs. And sundry other expenses.

Bang put it in the CV.

So it didn’t surprise me one bit when I read with great interest about the business school students in a recent worldwide push to campaign for the acceptance of an MBA ethics pledge modeled on the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors:

“…..to swear they won’t put personal ambitions before the interests of their employers or society.”

That’s all fine and dandy. But when I read somewhere else that people were actually taking them seriously?:

I nearly choked on my builders tea.