First: an apology to readers who are looking for the inside scoop on the goings-on at IESE, because I am not there – I have been in Boston for a week.

Being in Boston has provided me with a couple of insights on the broader MBA experience. I have spent my time here with a collection of MBA students from Harvard Business School (HBS), MIT Sloan and Boston College.

The first insight was into the benefits of being an MBA student while travelling. I have long expounded the pleasure of having a global network of classmates to look up when you are travelling the world. You can now layer on to this network (and I hate that word as much as the next man, or woman) literally thousands of friends and friends-of-friends from other business schools around the world.

Through a couple of friends in Boston I have met almost 100 other business school students, who all have another connection somehow, whether it is through their summer internship, an MBA sports event, or even a cousin studying at IESE. They have welcomed me into their circles in a way that would never be possible were it not for the business school connection.

The second insight is that I have now actually visited HBS, so I can compare it with IESE without resorting to my imagination.

While the IESE campus is nice and quietly impressive, the HBS campus is downright amazing. Not only is it grand in an Oxbridge sense, but the facilities would make a five-star spa retreat green with envy. The whole place seemed more like a gentlemen’s club than a school, with big leather sofas, huge bay windows ... and I’m pretty sure I saw a butler bringing a student his newspaper on a silver tray.

But my love for HBS has died down over the week as I considered the MBA experience as a whole. I had been impressed that every student I met had an impeccable business background and had lined up an amazing job to take up after the MBA. However, the flip side is that there is definitely an air of arrogance and I am glad that I spent the past two years with people I could really get along with, rather than with people who impressed me.

What’s more, the reason that the HBS campus is so luxurious is that there is pretty much nothing else to do in Boston. This is not something that can be said of Barcelona.

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