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Are MBAs An Unethical Bunch?
Should the MBA program change to have a biased towards ethics?
desire and greed
Business schools have received a battering from the media for causing the economic downturn with their loose interpretation of business ethics. Students have fought back – check the fanfare surrounding Harvard’s MBA Oath – but a report by higher education specialists CarringtonCrisp suggests that ethics might indeed not be a priority for all students.
The study, which analyzes the opinions of future MBAs on topics ranging from the MBA curriculum to their expectations of the program, was conceived amid the Credit Crunch and the rise of the MBA oath.
From a list of 30 options, 723 respondents were asked to identify the five most valuable pieces of content in an MBA program.
More than a third of all students said that strategic management; managing people and organizations, leadership and international business were “the most valuable part of their MBA studies.”
Relegated to the bottom of the list were taxation, logistics, and outsourcing and ethics, which were selected by less than 5 per cent of all respondents.
This could imply a number of things. It may be that the subject was badly taught, or that the students surveyed didn’t feel they had much more to learn.
Andrew Crisp, the director of CarringtonCrisp, offers another conclusion.
“Although ethics was placed in the bottom five I'm not sure it means that ethics is not valuable,” says Crisp. “I think the point about the findings is not that people don't want ethics, but that they expect it to be embedded in everything they learn rather than as a stand alone course.”
As a direct result of the recession, some business schools are going back to the drawing board and readdressing how ethics is taught in their programs.
Students are also taking business ethics into their own hands. To limit the damage done to their image, Harvard b-school students have created the MBA oath- a kind of Hippocratic oath for business - which now has chapters stretching from Australia to Vietnam.
Click here for more details.
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I can confirm that it is really international. My class has 15 nationalities out of 30 students and the average age is 30 years old.
from Jean-Patrick TSANG KWONG U
from Jean-Patrick TSANG KWONG U
MBAs nothing but Business Con artists. It is taught in all schools starting from Harvard and Warton ............. Money is their goal, how else they can reach there. Wonderful Engineers who created this world were thrown and kicked to trash. this is the reason all the economic isses in this world. in short MBAs are desructive forces of the nature=Greed.
raj
hello businessbecause team - is there a way to paste hyperlinks in to comments on your website?
Jen
Totally agree - how can you 'teach' ethics in a class - surely by the time you reach busienss school you should have an established moral compass?! read this last fall in the FT - views on teaching business ethics from profs at ashridge, hbs, denver, rotman: www.rotman.utoronto.ca/rogermartin/FT_CanYouTeachEthics.pdf
Jen