SWORN LEADERS

Harvard Business School graduates have sworn their own Hippocratic oath for business. So is this the first step in a more ethical model of leadership, or simply a knee-jerk response to the bad PR that followed the financial crisis?

FOLLOWING THE WORST FINANCIAL CRISIS since the Great Depression, bankers aren’t the only people in the sin bin. With fallen CEOs, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, Andy Hornby of HBOS and Rick Wagoner of General Motors all boasting MBAs from top business schools, angry commentators are queuing up to condemn MBA programmes as partly to blame for the mess we’re in.

Of course, the truth is probably that MBAs receive too much praise in boom times, then are blamed too harshly for the hangover when the party is over. But with the reputation of the famous business degree threatening to evaporate quicker than an investment banker’s bonus, Harvard business school student Max Anderson and 30 of his colleagues have taken steps to redeem the MBA.

Based on the work of two of the business school’s professors, Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, Anderson and his chums penned a Hippocratic oath for business. The oath, which is printed on little pledge cards, begins by declaring that the purpose of a manager is “to serve the greater good by bringing together people and resources to create valuable goods and services for society”.

Then there are eight specific pledges. The first requires managers to safeguard “the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate”, while the second promise is to “manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behaviour that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the society it serves”. Other pledges include a duty to act with “utmost integrity” and being held “accountable to my peers”.

Anderson and his colleagues don’t deny that the pursuit of self-interest will remain at the core of capitalist economies. But they do want fellow MBA graduates to acknowledge that model began modestly too. That it was only after the Second World War and the “discovery of gruesome experiments” done in the name of medicine that medical schools widely adopted it.

The Harvard oath has certainly caused a stir within the business school community. Critics say that the oath is merely a fad and will do little to change business values or practices. They contend it would do nothing to prevent another dot.com bubble, energy trading bubble, property bubble or debt bubble.

As with the chastity pledge taken by some Christian teenagers, sceptics say it is simply unrealistic to suppress natural urges. And that if tough regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley failed to prevent big corporations from hiding tens of billions of dollars off their balance sheets, then a simple oath ain’t going to do the trick either.

But Dr Suman Modwel, professor at the ENPC School of International Management in Paris, says that “we do not anticipate making any such over-dramatic gesture. Taking oaths and loudly proclaiming to uphold good conduct sounds to us like a fashion statement. The Hippocratic oath precedent for doctors, which is very specific to their discipline and centuries old in its origin, cannot apply to such a disparate group as managers.”

The Harvard oath was the topic of discussion in a recent class taken by David Grayson, professor of corporate responsibility at Cranfield School of Management near London, who says he found the class split between those who were enthusiastic about it, those who were sceptical about the idea, and some who questioned both the concept and its content.

“The concept of an oath is less interesting than the fact it has opened up debate about what business is for and what is going to be the MBA graduate’s role within it,” says Prof Grayson. “We regularly have open debate about these issues – students organise their own conference at the end of their MBA, and for the past four years corporate responsibility has been a theme of those conferences.”

Each year, HEC Paris takes more than 60 of its international MBA students to the Sereys monastery in the remote Chomelix area of France for an ethics course, led by a former lawyer turned Benedictine monk. “When money is the only driver for success, ethics is a fad,” says Valerie Gauthier, associate dean. “Writing an oath and swearing you’ll uphold to some ideals is a way to buy back a lost soul. In leadership, only your acts are what count: it is what you do and how you behave that proves your ethics, nothing else.”

Other schools say the Harvard oath, which is based partly on one introduced at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona, is nothing new. “We have had an honour code for the past nine years,” says Stacey Kole, deputy dean for the MBA programme at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, which has a campus in London. “We regard honesty and integrity as qualities essential to a successful career so the material is first introduced to prospective students when they apply for admission. It sets the tone for the standards of behaviour we expect from them within the school and when representing Chicago Booth externally.”

In Milan, Valter Lazzari, MBA director at SDA Bocconi School of Management, says an introductory oath is under discussion there. “We agree on the content of the code of honour. But it is probably better to make the content of the code of honour part of the screening process in the application procedure rather than just a proclamation after that,” he explains.

“If we introduce an oath like this now, we run the risk of lending credibility to the idea that business schools contributed to the current crisis, which we think is definitely not true. It is not a matter of talking the talk, but walking the walk. If business schools did something wrong, I’d rather have that behaviour changed as opposed to adding another boilerplate truism.”

Perhaps a better idea for MBA graduates who are ‘walking the walk’ is to walk and talk just a little bit louder. Take, for example, Indian social entrepreneur Gajender Sharma, voted MBA Student of the Year 2008 by the Association of MBAs (AMBA). Sharma, who earned his MBA at HEC Paris, now works at Tokyo-based management consultancy AT Kearney. But he has also set up a charitable organisation called Positive Drive, which is aimed at giving children in developing countries access to education by helping their parents to find jobs.

The implication that those with MBAs are greedy and/or incompetent does an injustice to the vast majority working and making a positive contribution to the global economy, argues Vin Hammersley, director of communications at Warwick Business School.

“Corporate social responsibility is embedded in everything we do here, so the only ‘oaths’ I have heard around this place are those currently being used about Max Anderson’s uninformed implication that all MBAs go into the banking and finance sector and most of them have been ‘conducting gruesome experiments’. I guess that if any lessons are to be learned, they are that greedy business schools beget greedy alumni, Mr Anderson,” he states.

WORDS BY IAN WYLIE
ILLUSTRATION BY JEMMA ROBINSON

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