Responsibilities of Business Leadership
June 24, 2009 by Will Marre
Recently I was sad to read that although business schools are making a sincere effort to promote ethical and moral leadership in their students, it’s having a hard time gaining popularity. The Harvard MBA graduating class of 2009 was invited to take a pledge to strive to act with honesty and integrity, to try to create sustainable prosperity, to oppose all forms of corruption and exploitation, and to take responsibility for their actions. Amazingly only 20% of the graduates opted to make this commitment formally. That’s not to say that 80% are immoral self interested greed geniuses, it just speaks to the low level that MBA training has gotten to. When MBA schools started 50 years ago, their courses were viewed with values and leadership responsibilities. Today they’ve shifted into trade schools to enable bright young men and women to simply figure out how to make money. Because we have 1,200 MBA schools who turn out most of the leaders who run our biggest institutions this is more than a small problem. A Harvard business professor, Rakesh Khurana wrote a book about the history of business education called, “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands.” When he gives speeches on the subject of business schools he says that the audience primarily squirms in their seats with the idea of professionalizing the responsibilities of business leadership. There is something deeply wrong with this picture. It is time for a mental revolution; a revolution of thinking about the responsibility of leading any organization to create a future of sustainable abundance. Surely our best and brightest should be leading this revolution instead of dragging our feet!
Will…
You are a great man…with the Honor and Integrity that is no longer the standard of our Nation…
A friend of mine created a new site …please join…you will be much appreciated…and I would be proud to know you are on the Team…
HONOR IN OFFICE
The site is http://www.honorinoffice.org
Purpose is to get Our Leaders to Read the Bills and Understand them before they sign it.
check it out…
The kids who go to business school grew up cheating in highschool with their TEXT messaging…that was the PURPOSE of Text Messaging popularity …TEST CHEATING…so they are not at all interested in DOING THE WORK…and being ABLE …and knowledgeable or concerned about the community or any for that matter …they are devoid of a sense of what it means to lead by example…they are petty criminals already looking for the next COOL way to get away with something…
The concept of setting a high STANDARD is not in their VOCABULARY …
SO…it starts in the Grade schools…with the next generation…
And TELEVISION was once the back bone of preparing us to be better citizens…all the original programming was always about ETHICS and MORALS and that it matters what you do…and the consequences are tragic…Now …Look at THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW …he never runs out of sick troubled demented …immoral Americans to spew their guts about how AWFUL and Corrupt they are in their personal lives….our Nation also is in denial that waht they do to others MATTERS
anyway…keep up the great work Will…
Just a short rant…to support your work…
The signing of an ethical commitment letter should be a no brainer for one who has already been committed to conducting one’s life in an ethical and honorable fashion. Truly, for some, the definition of “ethical” is a fungible concept. It is easy to find fault with the seeming lack of capacity to sign such a document - however, like similar “rules of the road” speeding, stop signs, yellow / red lights etc. it is much easier to agree in concept then when the rubber is actually on the road and the light is changing ahead. So what would be the down side of signing such a document and not living up to it? Folks make marriage commitments in droves only to break them 50+% of the time. Would I have people sign a document they had no interest or willingness to live up to? No. But why wouldn’t they at least sign it and give it the ol’ Harvard try. Is it that Yoda got to them and both individually and collectively they have decided that in a do or not do world they are not even going to try? These folks are not even “followers” but rather lemmings heading off to the slaughter of life’s follies ahead. A SAD commentary.