Does MBA stand for "Me Before Anyone"?
While attending a dinner at the Stanford Executive Program last summer, Rod Kramer, currently a visiting professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, got an ear full for not teaching morality to MBA students from the wife of an important corporate executive. She said that failure was the cause of the global financial meltdown.
Hardly a month goes by without yet another headline about apparent unethical behavior in the executive suite: from criminal misrepresentation, to tax evasion, manipulation of accounts, and a whole smorgasbord of fraud. Hundreds of companies have been investigated by the SEC over fraudulent behavior; from Bernie Madoff to Enron, from Martha Stewart to Johnson & Johnson and WorldCom. Today, scandals in the upper echelons of business are hardly shocking.
These scandals are forcing business schools around the country to undergo self-examination. At Dartmouth, the Tuck School of Business now has a mandatory ethics and social responsibility requirement. New York University's Stern School of Business added a class on policy responses to the financial crisis. The New England College of Business and Finance offers an online master's in "business ethics and compliance."
Harvard's January program for students will include courses in moral leadership, distressed debt, and global real estate. Harvard dean Jay Light says what came out of last spring's faculty workshop was a "renewed appreciation that things can go wrong at all levels" and that his school hadn't spent enough energy addressing that reality.
After the rise of Michael Milken (Wharton MBA '70) and the fall of Eron (Jeffrey Skilling, Harvard MBA '79), there were predictable cries for more vigilance. Elective courses in ethics, responsibility and moderation followed scandal-plagued eras.
No surprise it's back now.
Source: FORTUNE, October 26, 2009
