Christine Arena 
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The results are in on who MBA students regard as their future employers of choice.
Following a financial crisis that is expected to result in over 55 million people thrown into extreme poverty and starvation, and to result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of infants before their first birthdays, working in investment banks might have lost its sheen, no?
No. The latest IDEAL employer survey finds that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have come in as 3rd and 14th most popular choice for future employer. Both these firms are under investigation for alleged fraud involving the mortgage derivative products that provide a crucial link in the causal chain that led to the crisis.
And remember that movement for an MBA oath of social responsibility in business? That, also, now begins to look like a fleeting moment of conscience.
Looks like it is back to business schools as usual.
This time it is Marylhurst University launching a "sustainability MBA" online.
Anaheim University in California already has one and has taken this moment to announce that enrollments are doing very nicely thank you: nearly doubled over the last 3 months.
Ronald J. Colombo, corporate and securities law professor at Hofstra University School of Law, argues that the route out of this crisis is character.
In a well written piece in the HuffPo, Mr Colombo sets out the limits of law in providing a real solution to current problems, the need instead for the cultivation of virtue - a renewed emphasis on character development in business education.
In one of the latest contributions to the HBR debate on business education, the Rotman School's Roger Martin calls for a deep, broad and dynamic MBA.
In some respects he appears to be advocating a more philosophical approach to management education that encourages the questioning of standard assumptions, models and frameworks. Good to see from a business school dean.
New leadership will be collaborative, leading from the ground, interpersonally sensitive, and maximizing created good rather than personal wealth.
So argue educators and CEOs in this piece from the Financial Post in Canada.
They intereview Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto:
"“The crisis is [partly] a product of managerial theory and needs to be revisited in a serious way,” Mr. Martin says. The notion that companies need to align managers with shareholders by giving them stock-based compensation is flawed, he says. Mr. Martin refers to the widely influential Jensen and Meckling academic paper, published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1976, which argued that equity ownership by managers would reduce misalignment between them and shareholders. That theory created a generation of executives more interested in boosting stock prices than creating a real market, he adds."
A curious post to the ongoing HBR debate on business schools and the crisis suggests that MBA course applicants should be tested for altruism.
Claudio Fernández-Aráoz recommends that schools "see whether applicants have in the past demonstrated altruistic values in practice - on the job, in their personal activities, in contributions to valuable social causes, and in community service"
It took Chris MacDonald at the Business Ethics Blog about two hours to weigh in querying the relevance of demonstrations of pure altruism to the ethical conduct of business. Sounds to me like a recipe for the recruitment of people who are prepared to do whatever it takes to make a buck, to be followed by some conscience salving "giving back".
There is a swift round-up of this phase of the HBR debate here.
Former Harvard Business School faculty member and author of "When Corporations Rule the World" has entered the HBR debate on business education.
He argues that the most important lesson he learned at business school was the need to fix a system rather than the symptoms of a problem. Never was that lesson more important than in the current economic crisis. Yet, to his knowledge, Harvard Business School simply does not encourage its students to think outside the paradigm of the current system.
Did the MBA training of so many of our business leaders help cultivate the short-termism and irresponsibility that generated the economic crisis?
There is an interesting debate going on over at the Harvard Business Review website these next few weeks that attempts to address this question.
Loads of business school folk are writing blog posts. So far, I see a Chicago economist and a former Chief Learning Officer for Goldman Sachs defending business schools defending business schools, and Henry Mintzberg (a professor of management at McGill University) and two other management professors trashing them. Fascinating.
For the record, BusinessWeek and Forbes have also debated this of late.
Are business schools themselves debating this?
Report discusses curriculum responses by Harvard, Stern and Yale schools, among others.
We hear many stories of MBA schools trying to enhance their responsibility credentials, but few that have chosen to refute so categorically their ways of old and to re-engineer for a more responsible future.
This article sets out an interview with Peggy Cunningham, recruited by Dalhousie as the new Director for the School of Business Administration.
In the attached video, we see marketing professor Dr Cunningham talking last year about sustainable consumption.
The survey, "New Leaders, New Perspectives: A Survey of MBA Student Opinions on the Relationship Between Business and Social/Environmental Issues", echoes what I have been thinking since completing my own MBA at London Business School in 1998:
"Nine out of ten respondents say that a focus in business on short-term rather than long-term results has been one of the contributing factors to the global financial crisis. Just 24% of respondents strongly agree that they are learning how to make business decisions that will help avert similar crises. In addition, a majority of the students surveyed strongly agree that there is a need for business schools to introduce other financial models into the curriculum, specifically models that take long-term social impacts into account."
The APEsphere troop
Never kick a straw man when he’s down (TML No.4 part 3)
This is part 3 of The Missing Link number 4, in which CSR is defined. >>
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- on 15 May 2009
Never kick a straw man when he’s down (TML No.4 part 2)
What of the next line of attack: that activities that benefit society at the expense of shareholders amount to “borrowed virtue” >>
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- on 15 May 2009
CSR: Confusions of Social Responsibility (TML no.3)
There are so many competing definitions of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We need to define what we are talking about in The Missing Link. >>
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- on 28 Apr 2009
What they don’t teach you at business school about CSR
A missing link, according to Wikipedia, is an "intermediary form of life that illustrates an evolutionary transition". >>
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