Responsibilities of Business Leadership

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!