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USA Edition | Today Is Tuesday, March 9, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Tuesday, March 9, 2010 |
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| MBA Virus — A Definition | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | Greed’s Disease — A Definition | |
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The MBA -- What Responsibility To Society?
I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.
Student-Proposed MBA Oath
Proposed MBA Oath
Business has a role in serving society and making the world a better place.
Peter Escher, 29
Harvard MBA Student
The press, including Newsroom Magazine, has attached blame for the institutionalized malfeasance that brought down the financial sector to MBA ethics and thinking. While this clearly suggests guilt by association for MBA degree holders, there are vast differences in culpability among the thousands of otherwise honorable and respected people who sought out higher education in the fields of business and commerce.
In many ways it is the MBA degree itself that is on trial today. Such a simple cause and effect relationship is not entirely warranted, however. Recent failures suffered by western capitalism, credit markets and financial institutions were, to some degree, the byproduct of a complex set of enabling attitudes, practices and cultural conditioning.
Business and finance were only one of the more visible areas of human activity that have coarsened or taken on the characteristics of war in the last generation. Everywhere, it seems, a new system of enterprise management rose to prominence. One in which managerial methods and metrics ( performance data ) favoring short-term goals over long term strategies, emerged. The concepts of managing for efficiency were hardly new, but when college and university business schools made them central to their syllabus, the business administration model was soon overrun by the loop management ( servo driven ) model.
By managing only for bottom line performance, businesses easily fall prey to the illusion of success. Earnings mounting, stock holders making money, bonuses flowing . . . everything going great. The illusion of success is intoxicating even though everyone knows that deviations from historically sound and responsible management methods and practices have sharply increased risk.
Risk of being exposed. Risk of losing control. Risk of moving beyond some invisible point of no return. But the fix was in. Lying, cheating, corruption and deception became somehow acceptable — at least as long as one wasn’t caught at it.
Managers, executives, directors and shareholders all winked at ever-increasing failures of integrity, deceitful treatment of others, and outright malfeasance as the MBA strategy bubble inexorably expanded. “Everybody’s doing it,” became the mantra.
“If we don’t do it our competitors will!” became an institutionalized and accepted reason for cheating, stealing, corruption — anything that would stretch the illusion of success for “just one more quarter.”
Then, BAM! Reality struck.
Whether personally guilty or not, hundreds of thousands of business school educated workers lost their jobs. Millions of other Americans, who didn’t take the easy way, who had to struggle with 34% interest on their credit card debt, lost their jobs, their homes, and even their families. It’s those absent business schooling who didn’t cheat, turn corrupt, steal, obfuscate, distort, skim, or risk other peoples lives and savings who now face bleak futures. These Americans have good reason to be damned angry — especially now that it’s clear that those who did wrong will largely go unchallenged by federal or state authorities.
That they are not angry today is to some degree their being overwhelmed by trying to survive, save their homes, keep their families intact, stay afloat. Then, there’s the embarrassing reality that big media have all but ignored what’s likely the most immensely important story of this century.
Recent history reveals widespread distortions in business ethics, managerial practices and financial permissiveness in the last 30 years. Public attitudes on what had been two centuries of American social values and mores changed substantially. American life is, therefore, far more coarse today than in prior generations. Rudeness is epidemic. Attacks on public officials has become a socially divisive, but very profitable business.
Today there are perhaps 50,000 MBA degree holders in the job market. They are not going away, nor are their attitudes about what’s right and wrong, suitable or unsuitable, or lawful. We schooled them to be opportunists, not responsible adults. We trained them to figure the angles, spin the truth to avoid reality, outsource other people’s jobs without concern for either the families, or the community.
And what about our own changing attitudes about our obligations to one another? Where do we value trustworthiness? Where do we draw the line on our own aspirations for individual, rather than group achievement?
We encourage good grades, not matter if inflated, or unearned. Then we send our progeny to prestigious universities, like Harvard, or The Ohio State University so they can be trained in how to cheat, steal, abdicate responsibility, and avoid honest dealing. That we do so has daunting implications far beyond our current dislocations.
We sent them to business school based on our aspirations that they get good ( high paying ) jobs. No matter if we chose Stanford, Wharton, MIT or Kellogg, we sent them there to get in the game, to do what everyone else was doing, to become successful in the only way we saw success: becoming wealthy no matter the consequences to them, ourselves, or our nation.
“Get out there, son,” we said, “It’s time to get yours.”
Business schools got the message. Small colleges and large universities got the message. Success is money. Money is good. Ethics are nice, honor is commendable, but make some god-damned money! Thus was born an MBA virus that has infected most of our commercial and governmental institutions.
No wonder our MBA programs are inherently corrupt. We demanded that they be. They will not change unless we demand that they do so.
More to the point, like the banks they run, MBA thinking is not going to change either. Unless we demand that it change. For a nation that cannot remove the thieves and crooks that took down our mightiest financial institutions, and who now threaten the financial stability of a once great nation, there is scant evidence of resolve to overcome any of these problems.
Whatever the social changes have been, none of them exempts any of us from our responsibilities to our communities. So, when a large segment of the population thinks only of personal achievement, doing what’s fun in preference to doing what’s needed, and that it’s every man for himself in modern life, the illusions of success without hard work, wealth accumulation absent investment, and highly intellectual criminality all seem acceptable.
That’s when the mantra of MBA thinking takes on the feel of reality: “Show me the money!”
At most American universities, learning about our civilization, historical foundations, cultural achievements, history, and failures has given way to job-skill training for personal enrichment.
At most American universities, learning about our civilization, historical foundations, cultural achievements, history, and failures has given way to job-skill training for personal enrichment. Business education, for example, is no longer about managing private sector enterprises for the greater good, but about the optimization of enterprise for the greatest attainable efficiency and profitability.
The public interest business management model that produced an ethical pharmaceuticals industry capable and willing to produce penicillin and a polio vaccine that effetely ended the scourge of poliomyelitis, no longer exists. The personal attainment business school model has redefined the ethical drug industry away from curing serious illness and toward symptomatic drugs whose use is continuous and therefore far more profitable.
While business schools and MBA degree programs bear the weight of today’s growing public distrust, the trend away from public service to personal gain in higher education is not new. To the dismay of scholars who consider nuance and implication in everything they do and write, the colleges and universities that employ them have shed their academic predisposition and taken on the values and goals of businesses.
It is now common, especially at public universities, to offer non traditional courses that focus on salable employment skills with little or no liberal arts foundation. Once an institution buys into the concept that degrees in Roman History are of little or no value while degree programs in communications, consumer sciences, human and community resource development, fashion and retail studies, family resource management, and aviation management are often promoted for their earnings enhancement potential.
As colleges began to compete with one another on the basis of personal gain where previously they competed on public advancement, there began a systemic encroachment of monetary values over academic quality.
Perhaps no other area of higher education has so sharply abdicated public advancement values than have the business schools. Taken together, the changes in educational policy, purpose and scope altered most but not all western educational institutions from instruments of public good into instruments of personal advancement.
Me was in.
Greed was good.
Knowing something thus became more valuable than understanding anything.
