“Unlike George W. Bush, who was a year behind him in business school and was immortalized in the yearbook blowing a huge bubble of gum, Mr. Romney had limited interest in socializing. (The two barely met, but if Mr. Romney had known where Mr. Bush “was gonna go, I would have been on him like white on rice,” he later told The Atlantic.)
And unlike Barack Obama, who attended Harvard Law School more than a decade later, Mr. Romney was not someone who fundamentally questioned how the world worked or talked much about social or policy topics. Though the campus pulsed with emotionally charged political issues, none more urgent than the Vietnam War, Mr. Romney somehow managed to avoid them.
“Mitt’s attitude was to work very hard in mastering the materials and not to be diverted by political or social issues that were not relevant to what we were doing,” said Mark E. Mazo, a former law school study partner.
Instead, Mr. Romney threw his energy into being the best. Nearly all business school students formed study groups to help them digest the constant flow of cases, but Mr. Romney recruited a murderers’ row of some of the most distinguished students in the class. “He and I said, hey, let’s handpick some superstars,” said Howard Serkin, a classmate.
Every day for an hour, the all-male group — there were relatively few women in the program back then — sat at a semicircular table outside the classroom and briefed one another on the reading material. It was an exercise in mutual protection, since any of them could be called on in class and their performance would affect their grades. Mr. Romney served as a kind of team captain, the other members said, pushing and motivating the others.
“He wanted to make straight A’s,” Mr. Serkin said. “He wanted our study group to be No. 1.” Sometimes Mr. Romney arrived early to run his numbers a few extra times. And if his partners were not prepared, “he was not afraid of saying: ‘You’re letting us down. We want to be the best,’ ” Mr. Serkin added.”
Source: How Harvard Shaped Mitt Romney
What kind of elites that will lead Indonesia? Some of the top positions in our country’s institutions will be filled by private sectors. I don’t want the Indonesia to be led by such shallow elites.
The recruitment process by elite firms selects for ideology-agnostic problem solving skills. This might make sense given any strong political or religious fervour is discouraged as it is not commercially beneficial for the operation for such firm. or might be even detrimental because it could narrow down the client prospect or market size for being accused of siding with one side or another. However this will produce cohorts of employees that are merely mindless automatons capable of doing anything, but have insufficient conscience to justify why they should (or shouldn’t) do so.
These mindless automatons should be blocked from office.
radjathaher 