Indeed one does. One also needs to brush up on argumentative fallacies. It's quite bad to criticize the author's reasoning whilst yourself engaged in bad reasoning.

To be clear, your original post was mostly reasoning along the lines, "My experience was different therefore the author is wrong." And your second post didn't specify why you think your experience was normative. Merely that you think in a band of a few years you know how others benefitted or didn't from HBS. This is especially bad reasoning as the article talked about HBS influence over a much broader range of years.