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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, September 6, 2010 |
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| Browsing Higher Education Section | 6 Items Found | ||
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The Wharton School, University Of Pennsylvania
In the American model, capitalism is an essential engine that equally supports societal needs and private interest. There is an implied capitalist compact that defines a balance between public interest and private interest that is consistent with the success and long term survival of both personal and public needs and aspirations.
Philadelphia
What If America’s MBA Programs Were Required To Speak Clearly?
We provide an exhilarating educational experience in which the student will learn how to disregard societal norms of behavior, abdicate traditional standards of decency, develop ethical work-arounds and master the skills necessary to avoid responsibility and accountability. If you do these things well, what you learn here will make you wealthy and threaten your fellow countrymen with financial collapse.
Capitalist Compact
For most of the 20th century, America’s best business schools undergirded their curriculum by way of a time-proven, reliable and reasonable philosophical foundation. Some called it business philosophy, or ethical framework, or wizened public policy, but at its heart were notions of balancing the interests of private enterprise against the needs of society. For some, balancing the rights of individuals and public policy are emblematic of a Capitalist Compact in which there exists an implied agreement between capitalists and society that encourages investment and risk taking for the benefit of all in exchange for economic opportunity and managerial freedom for persons and private sector institutions.
What’s to be learned from the collapse of financial markets in 2009 is that when the private sector becomes the sole decision maker, our freedoms are at risk. Unrestrained business, like unrestrained government is intrinsically damaging to democracy. Why don’t we get this straight? The answer lies in us as individuals because we like to do what’s popular when we need to be doing what’s right. If the tendency of government is to do too much in order to produce too little, it seems that the tendency in business is to mindlessly inflict damage on society, nation, communities and the people who produce wealth and fight to protect their freedoms.
Balancing Public And Private Interests
The MBA pandemic has spread a one-sided model of capitalism — one in which failed education,self dealing, self interest, and managerial self enrichment drives rogue enterprises that openly abdicate the capitalist compact the connective tissue that connects private interests, democracy and national interest.
One example of the capitalist compact at work is the creation of the juridical person [ state chartered corporations ] to encourage capital accumulation and investment. Capitalists are thus enabled to create super-persons that can accumulate immense power and assets and live indefinitely. This arrangement benefits owners, investors, workers, managers, employees, communities, society and government.
No matter the immense powers granted to commercial and industrial interests, the capitalist compact limits business to a role subservient only to those essential public interests upon which business and democracy jointly rest. When working properly, the capitalist compact acknowledges public interests in defining what’s legal and what isn’t while assuring private interests freedom to determine how best to exploit available opportunities.
In the American model, capitalism is an essential engine that equally supports societal needs and private interest. The capitalist compact defines a balance between public interest and private interest that is consistent with the success and long term survival of both personal and public needs and aspirations.
The philosophical foundation upon which capitalist compact thinking is based is not idealistic, but practical in the sense that businesses work best when there is balance between economic incentive and even handed, but certain restraint.
Left entirely to its own devices unfettered capitalism is inconsistent with a constitutional democracy and dangerous to personal freedoms. It’s not that capitalism starts out to do harm but the reality that unbridled anything — including government — has the capacity to damage society and essential institutions beyond business.
Wharton School, University Of Pennsylvania
When you pursue a Wharton MBA, you will transform yourself. You’ll gain real-world knowledge within a rigorous, collaborative, invigorating environment. You’ll learn new ways to think about problems, and then you’ll solve them. Because when you lead with inspiration and deep knowledge, you won’t just advance your own goals, you’ll advance society as well.
That’s why a Wharton MBA is more than a degree
Stakeholder Interests
| Business Stakeholders | Compact | MBA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owners | providers of capital | • | • |
| Employees | providers of activity | • | |
| Managers | providers of decision making | • | • |
| Community | providers of infrastructure | • | |
| Society | providers of opportunity | • | |
| Government | providers of protection, civil stability, freedom, and legal system. | • | |
At its heart the capitalist compact defines a plurality of interested parties [ stakeholders ] in every business, big or small. To be successful over the long term the interests of each of these parties must be considered — concepts that were routinely taught to business school students for most of the 20th century. Absent a clear understanding of the immensely important public interests in every business, managers tend to focus on the interests of only two stakeholders: shareholders and managers.
While a broad view of business, one that acknowledges all stakeholder interests, remains a cornerstone of most undergraduate business school curriculums today, today’s MBA trained managers seek to serve only owners and managers at the expense of all other parties.
MBA values have led to an erroneous belief that employees are only liabilities — expendable and easily replaced. Carried to the extreme, such thinking would transfer all American jobs overseas to be more efficient and competitive. But firing all the Americans workers would also end American consumption and produce massive damage to the impacted communities, societal stability and government.
Of course no one argues that outsourcing all American jobs is either desirable, or even possible. To the contrary, the management style loose in American business today assumes that every company can make its own choices without concern for the long term impact of MBA strategies on all stakeholders. In the last quarter-century, short term thinking, the kind favored by managers seeking personal wealth whatever the consequences to the business itself, or its community of stakeholders, have done immense damage to most, but not all American businesses.
Most of that damage arises from decisions and policies that seek to serve only the two MBA favored stakeholders. Thus, the needs of largely transient shareholders — with no interest in the business and no commitment to its future success, are given first priority no matter the overall impact on the corporation or its industry. It’s not that providing a reasonable return on investment is flawed. To the contrary, what MBA degree holders have demanded is a badly flawed compensation model that makes it more profitable for shareholders and managers to rape the business than to reinvest in its long term success.
Tuck School Of Business At Dartmouth College
Tuck’s curriculum is comprehensive and specific. The focus is on leadership. Through rigorous coursework you will acquire the knowledge you need to lead—in finance, strategy, marketing, general management, and more. You will be ready. Not just for your next great job, but for your career. For your future.
Pursuing a Tuck MBA is a wise investment in yourself and in your future.
Personal Benefit Over Fiduciary Responsibility
How Did MBA Thinking Become An Instrument Of Destruction?
Today, what was once a masters degree in business administration has evolved into a distorted, irresponsible and misdirected managerial skill development and training program. As originally conceived, a masters degree in business carried forward the overview nature of business education — accounting, marketing, administration, finance, insurance, economics, distribution, management theory, statistics and industrial history.
Graduate schools that once saw themselves responsible for ascertaining that specialty degrees served the public interest lost their way. They did so once they bought into being competitive with one another by ways of promoting personal benefit over public benefit. Doing so was a substantial shift in higher education, not just business schools, for until the late 20th century, the undergirding mission in American colleges had been to educate students for the good of the community as a whole, not for their personal or private benefit.
Deregulation Induced Instability
What’s becoming clear to millions of Americans, and billions more overseas, is that MBA thinking has made of itself an enabler of mediocrity, advocate for irresponsibility, and instrument for destruction of our society, economy and freedoms. The MBA cult that drives American business has produced accounting firms who sell out their credibility for temporal earnings, drug makers who who milk health care with palliatives and symptom relief products, health insurors who abandon insureds in time of need, and banks that speculate with depositor and shareholder monies for big bonuses and personal wealth. There is no reason to believe that business schools intended this, only that they encouraged it.
Extension of the successful Harvard MBA model, based in part on case-study and specialization that focuses on serving the interests of owners and managers, to other colleges has proven to be fatally flawed. The reason is not scholarly, but philosophical for the Harvard model now being used at business schools worldwide works against the interests of employees, society, community, and government. The result has enabled and encouraged public companies that are poorly, or even disastrously mismanaged, and banks that have abdicated their socially critical banking functions to enhance managerial bonuses through risk taking, speculation and/or extortion.
Stanford Graduate School Of Business
The Stanford Dynamic puts the values of the Business School in action. The Stanford MBA Program is shaped by three distinctive traits whose combination provides an unmatched educational experience.
- Learning built around you
- Unparalleled Community and Strategic Size
- School of the Future
Historical Perspective
Notions of public service, ethics, probity and enlightenment began to fade after the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963. The passing of the Camelot era in America, the divisive Viet Nam War, and hostage taking in Iran during the Carter administration were interconnected in the sense that they were evidence of a nation undergoing substantial change in attitudes, values and politics. What followed was overt commercialization of American life — something that profoundly affected nearly every aspect of daily life.
Whether those earning business degrees could think for themselves, or had been exposed to entrepreneurial problem-solving, or could write a coherent declarative sentence mattered less than their mastery of job skills that would warrant higher pay or better opportunities for advancement.
The reason so many colleges and universities were caught up in what has proven a failed educational model, is that in the college business, it makes no difference if one knows of Plato’s insight, or Thoreau’s projections from Walden, or Benjamin Franklin’s immense contributions toward defining what it is to be a free citizen or responsible elector.
What we know for certain today is that the MBA model being taught today threatens our nation and our freedoms. For in the end, MBA trained managers believe people beyond their corporate co-conspirators don’t matter, nor their families, nor communities ripped open by closed factories, lost jobs or disappearing tax base.
That we have done this to ourselves is inexcusable, if not criminal. Newsroom Magazine contributor Harley Blank summed it up well when he wrote,
“2008-2009 confirms a failure of morals both public and private.”