The MBA Oath

ROFL. OK, maybe I am a bit cynical here but this story on NRP about the MBA Oath that some Harvard MBAs took made me laugh out loud.

They have a website (who doesn't?) and here's the oath:

As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face choices that are not easy for me and others.

Therefore I promise:

  • I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.

  • I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.

  • I will manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.

  • I will understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my enterprise.

  • I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.

  • I will develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.

  • I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.

  • I will be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.


This oath I make freely, and upon my honor.



I thought it was important to have the whole thing here. While I do agree with the principle of this Oath, there is nothing backing it up. If someone breaks the Oath will they be disbarred from being Managers? What's the repercussion of breaking the oath? Lawyers and Doctors have a board to answer to. MBAs/managers do not.

This brings back memories of my ethics classes. Interesting stuff. I definitely subscribe to the idea. It's just that people need to be held accountable, to be certified like doctors and lawyers and to have some power over them. Otherwise this is just an idealistic exercise that will potentially go out the window as soon as the going gets tough.

OK, enough old man cynicism for one day :-)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Academic Facepalm (evaluation edition)

Image
Back in December, I was searching for the #tenure hashtag on twitter.   There was some discussion (probably stated by Jesse Stommel 😜) which prompted me to search for this #hashtag out of curiosity to see what was tagged.  Along with heartwarming stories of people who've just earned tenure (a nice perk right before the winter break!), there was this wonderful tweet specimen... I'm not gonna lie.  IT BUGS ME. It bugs me as a learner.   I've always completed course evaluations and I tried to give honest feedback to the professor.  If the course was easy, hard, just right, I wanted them to know.  If I was appreciative, I wanted them to know.  Yes, sometimes I've half-assed it and just completed the Likert scale with a "loved the course" comment at the end, but many times I try to be more concrete about the feedback. It bugs me as a program manager. I am the individual who sets up, collects, and often reminds students, about the course evaluations.  M
Read more

Discussion forums in MOOCs are counter-productive...well, sort of...

Image
The other day I was reading this blog post on why MOOC forums are counter-productive .  I was really thinking hard about this and my initial inclination is to agree. Forums, in MOOCs, are  counter-productive. But, as with most things in life, there is a big asterisk here. If we look at how MOOCs are setup, and by MOOC here I mean xMOOC since that's what most people think of, the discussion board is one big crazy mess. Coursera has done something interesting in crowdsourcing thread relevancy by allowing people to up-vote or down-vote threads, but at their core these discussions are setup like every other discussion forum out there in traditional education: There usually is a prompt that people will answer, and answers can be repetitive as well, so when you are the 1000th poster to a question prompt and you see that others have answered something similar to your answers, what is the motivation to wade through many, many, many similar answers in order to find the subtle contextual
Read more

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more