B-School Retraining: Gordon Gekkos Need Not Apply
"Is it time to retrain B-Schools?" was the headline in Sunday's New Tork Times article by Kelley Holland.
I say it's not only time to retrain business schools in the face of the unprecedented fiscal and risk management failure we face today, it's imperative. The core curriculum needs some serious overhaul. Business Schools must have required courses on ethics, and businesses need to schedule continuing education courses in ethics, too.
The call for a business code of conduct is not new. A movement that rises to the national level is one that seems to establish the professions of business much the way law and medicine have codes of conduct, certification examinations and continuing education requirements. While establishing such standards would at the very least create a context around business conduct, I think a standard that connects business conduct to improvement in our societal goals would have more impact. I am arguing for a broader base of ethical education beyond the business suite.
I served as a trustee of the New York University School of Business, now named The Stern School, in the mid 1980's. The markets were beginning to run away from basic fundamentals, The Gordon Gekko character from the movie Wall Street declared "greed is good" and regulation fell by the wayside. It's a familiar refrain we've heard, but never as clearly as in our current global melt down. When will we ever learn?
Back then, I repeatedly asked that ethics classes be required as a part of the B-school curriculum while serving as trustee. My pleas were of no avail. Dick West, then Dean of the Business School, sympathized and regretted that the faculty tried more than once to offer these courses, but students failed to show up. They argued they already had all the ethics they needed.
Maybe not. According to Bloomberg, in a recent study, conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, among MBA students found that they cheat more than students of any other discipline. The study found that 56% of MBA students acknowledged cheating, compared with 54% in engineering, 48% in education and 45% in Law School. Unfortunately, all of these percentages are shockingly high and say a lot about ethics in America.
So what ethics have we taught our students? It's okay to cheat as long as we don't get caught? Everybody else does it so I lose out if I don't? The attitude may explain to some degree why greed-is-good and everyone is winking and playing the game, so why shouldn't I?
Our problem with ethics is broader than the classes in B-schools, medical, engineering and law schools. We need to hold up a mirror to our own behavior and ask, what are our standards for ethical behavior? Where have we failed? And is it too late, as I was told in the 1980's to instill ethics in Graduate school? Or is late better than not at all? I say let's require ethics courses in B-schools. For my money, late is better than never. It's time we said, Gordon Gekko's need not apply.
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I keep posting this, and I have no idea why the moderator won't allow it, but I will try again. I went to NYU-Stern long after teh author of this post left, and by then they did require an ethics course, as did every other top 25 MBA program in the country.
Kay,
Please note: The Center for Academic Integrity now is located at Clemson University in South Carolina. It moved from Duke two years ago. Web site: http://www
Thanks
Teaching Ethics wont do anything.
Can you force someone to sit in an ethics class. sure.
Can you make an ethics exam a requirement to graduate. sure.
Most likely, majority of the students will pass. i could take any ethics class and ace it. its not that hard.
but would i be ethical in real life if i could gain by cutting corners. YOU BET !! but provided the reward was big enough compared to the punishment if caught.
see there is the angle. make the punishment of ethics violation extremely strict. that will be only way to deter violations.
Business ethics courses are a joke. If you want them to take a real courses in ethical theory and applied ethics, then it might be useful. If not, you might as well just let things go on as usual.
Yes, companies and CEO's talking aobut ethics is just hot air. I actually have a B.A in Ethics. I don't think any business enterprises are going to go out of their way to hire me.
And that's a real shame too (no sarcasm, I promise). You would be considered a "functional" employee instead of a "strategic" one; I've discovered in my many years of running my own business and working for some Fortune 500 ones that it's the functional employees, the ones hired execute the business plan, that are of most value to a company's bottom line. And the surprising thing: Functional employees also make better strategic decisions on achieving the bottom line goals (make more money in a more sustainable way) that strategic ones do. Probably due to more real-world market experience.
Ethics aside, MBA degrees are the equivalent to getting half a BA and then spending a year reading "theory" in the Financial Times. And I bet the market will bear this out over the next 10 years.
"Business Schools must have required courses on ethics..."
If people do not have a grounding in ethics by the time they go to graduate school, they will never acquire ethics in a classroom. If we really want people to act ethically, we must instill it all along the educational way.
Business school is a farce.
anyone can ace an ethics test. doing great on an ethics test has nothing to do with being ethical in real life
its beyond a school's ability to make anyone ethical. and a grad school at that.
people get their ethical roots way before that. Its the job of parents !! while they are growing up.
It is a commonn misperception that ethics can come solely and effectively from the family and parents. there is little understanding in the modern wolrd as to the ture nature and importance of an Ethics-based education. Plato said that very few were suited to understanding the true nature of morality. To understand morality required half a lifetime of study. Students would start when they were 7 and were considered ready to study morals when they were in the 30s, and only then after many years of studying geometry to train their minds.
So, in a discussion of ethics or morality, ask yourself if you think there is metaphysics of morals as Kant averred, or a genealogy of morals which is what Nietzsche claimed.
moralistic posturing will not improve a dumbed down population.
Law schoools and many B-school have explicit and implicit ethics course. The notion that ethics can be learned in graduate school and then applied in a competitive, cut-throat environment is silly. Typically a student is in their mid to late 20s by the time they reach these training programs. By then they should have learned "ethics" though their parents, religious organizations, undergraduate courses, collegues, and government.
Maybe making and loving money is the problem and at the root of our evil.
I want to know how Harvard B-School is going to make reparations to the USA for giving us George W. Bush.
And I disagree---ethics can be taught in a classroom. Whether it works or not depends on the character of the student.
Yes, anything CAN be taught in a classroom (look at al lthese silly on-line colleges), but does being taught to walk the high wire in a classroom make you a Flying Wallenda?
No, I am sorry, but you are completely wrong.
A certain percentage will always do the wrong thing when no one is looking. They profit from their wrong doing. That's why they do it. And they know that they are doing wrong.
What you are asking is that society educate morality and then we trust the graduates.
Trust is always the wrong answer.
The correct answer is to create a transparent mechanism for all transactions so that wrong doing is not possible.
And a certain percent are reachable - the fact that there is no 100%, perfect cure, is not a reason to do nothing.
We should educate about ethics and morality because no mechanism to monitor for wrong doing is perfect, and the more people out there who have thought about ethics, and consider what to do, the better. Some will do the right thing, some will not - but that's no reason to just give up.
Mechanisms are nice - and devious people find ways to avoid them. Ethical people are our next best line of defense.
We don't need ethics.
We need common sense. And there's a way to inculcate it.
When an industry is well regulated and the laws are well enforced, perpetrators of fraud know they will go to prison.
That deterrent is the only thing that will reduce white-collar crime.
You don't need ethics courses. Just bring in an FBI agent and have her say:
"If you break the law, we will find you out, try you, shame you, strip you, and throw you in prison."
If you back up that threat, fraud will substantially decline.
We say the same about murder - yet murder happens. No criminal ever thinks he'll be caught - whether it's a murderer, an embezzler, or any type of fraud.
We need both - laws, enforcement, AND ethics courses. Each mechanism will reach a different set of people.
What a joke--what kind of "ethics" would they teach in B-school anyway? The "objectivism" of Ayn Rand?
What textbooks are they going to use?
"The Golden Rule: Do unto others what fills your wallet"?
"101 Ethical Ways to Short Sell and Destroy a Productive Company"?
"How to Knowingly Sell Toxic Securities and Feel Like a G0ddamned Prince"?
"The Ancient, Moral Art of Creative Accounting"?
"Best and Brightest: How to Destroy the Global Economy With a Good Conscience, Yet Keep Your Retention Bonus"?
"Fifty-Seven Ethical Things to Do With a Whistle Other Than Blow It"?
"Masters of the Universe: A Guide to Ethics for Superior People the World Owes a Living"?
What good will ethics classes do when the shallow, greedy schemers drawn to the world of finance learn that no matter what crimes they commit, how much human misery they cause, or how much of others' wealth they destroy, they will always be rewarded with tens of millions of dollars and be immune from consequences, merely because they have managed to worm their way into an exclusive club of arrogant swine, the executives of the all-powerful banking cartel?
90% of the battle is good laws and regulations. After the political market was gamed so that the banking cartel could dictate the laws and regulations in its policy area, the whole industry became fraudulent, a casino for big games.
Law, regulation, transparency, oversight, punishment for crimes!
And sure, ethics courses, if it makes you feel any better.
No, I am sorry, but you are completely wrong.
A certain percentage will always do the wrong thing when no one is looking. They profit from their wrong doing. That's why they do it. And they know that they are doing wrong.
What you are asking is that society educate morality and then we trust the graduates.
Trust is always the wrong answer.
The correct answer is to create a transparent mechanism for all transactions so that wrong doing is not possible.
I've taken a bunch of business school classes. They were all pretty much useless. Everyone seemed to care about making money way more than the task/activity that would purportedly allow them to receive the money. Most people in med school really want to be a doctor. Most engineering PhD's really want to innovate a new technology. In contrast, most MBA students just want to make a lot of money. That's basically the difference.
Ethics teaching is a good thing - to be sure, for some it will not work - but for some it will. That makes it worthwhile. Some people are unreachable - that shouldn't blind us to the many that are, that change their behavior upon reflection and discussion. Most of us can think of moments, teachers, classes, experiences that changed how we saw the world. This can easily be one of them.
And push it throughout the school - eliminate the "greed is good", all of the ideals that suggest might makes right in any form - whether it's a Crip waving a gun to mug someone, or a stock market broker moving a client to a worse performing fund that will give him higher commissions.
As it turns out, a lot of business is just like fraternaties. And once you bring up fraternaty you've excluded any hope for ethics. Boys will be boys. How about politicians for that matter?
Hate to be the one to break the news, Kay, but if sending people to school to learn ethics was an effective remedy for what ails us, we'd be living in nirvana.
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