Harvard Is Revolting

“I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.”  from The MBA Oath

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Culture, Ethics, Responsibility, Accountability and the Future – Part III

Competencies: visionary leadership, political leadership, engenders trust, ethics, employee involvement, empowering others

Who benefits: everyone

Consultant Usage: every consultant, trainer, and leader should be setting the tone and driving these core competencies through their organizations and with individual employees; no one should call him/herself an executive coach who has not read and committed her/himself to The MBA Oath (regardless of educational level)

What’s it about? “As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can build alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face difficult choices.”

So begins the most important book I have read in this century.  That paragraph is the lead into the Eight Promises that makes up The MBA Oath: Setting a Higher Standard for Business Leaders.  It is the Hippocratic Oath for business leaders at all levels.  (As opposed I cynically suggest to the existing Hypocritical Oath currently practiced by way-too-many.)

If I had my way, I would let no future manager or supervisor enter an organization or be promoted upward in an organization who could not at a minimum articulate the principles promoted in this extremely highly recommended book. 

Today’s post is the third in a three part series on ethics and business standards in the world of work, no matter what type of an organization or where in the world it is located.

This book is written by graduates of the MBA Class of 2009 at Harvard Business School.  They want to start a revolution.  They are disgusted with those who have boasted an MBA to promote their own self-interests.  They are ready to say “enough already” to Wall Street greed, Enron corruption, Madoff self-indulgence. 

The MBA Oath can be found at their website.  Go there.  Read it.  Sign on.

The book supporting the oath is divided into to two parts.  Part I discusses the profession.  It describes why the oath is needed and is filled with some pithy statements of (slightly edited) wisdom like:

• Could capitalists actually bring down capitalism?
• American’s trust in big business is down from 80% forty-five years ago to 10% today.
• Business schools are currently rank by journalists and their publications by a single metric: “How much a graduate makes on his/her first year out of school.”  Journalists therefore have “become complicit in the denial system that the MBA is about anything other than personal self-advancement.”
• Currently most schools treat ethics and even leadership as standalone disciplines rather than integrated into the whole of the curriculum. “The moral consequences of one’s business decisions should be a consistent theme visited daily in the business school’s curriculum.”  
• “Theodore Roosevelt stated that to educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
• “Perhaps more thought should be given to emphasizing ethics and character as requirements for admission to business schools.”

Part II is about the principles.  In the space I have here, it is easiest to list the chapter headings in hopes to entice you to get the book, read it, and look for applications in your own life: 

• The Purpose of a Manager
• Ethics and Integrity
• No Man is an Island
• Ambition and Good Faith
• The Letter and the Spirit of the Law
• Responsibility and Transparency
• Personal and Professional Growth
• Sustaining Prosperity and Living Well
• Accountability

If we are to prevent or soften future economic, political, moral and ecological crises, this Harvard led revolution must succeed.  Bravo to those who sign on.

Catch you later.
[tags]business standards, visionary leadership, political leadership, business leadership, engenders trust, ethics, employee involvement, empowering others, corporate citizenship, organizational improvement, mba oath, harvard mba oath, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.