HBS student-led oath has taken shape of a widespread movement with aims to regain society’s trust, legitimacy
New age MBAs, after having gone through a world of embarrassment on the state of MBA leaders and the way they are looked at, have come up with ‘The MBA Oath’, a student-led voluntary pledge for MBAs to create value responsibly and ethically. Not surprisingly, the oath originated at Harvard Business School (HBS), which had to bear the maximum burnt of global meltdown accusations.
The movement, which began with an aim to get at least 100 HBS students in its fold, is spreading like wild fire. It has already been embraced by 469 (as on June 2, 2009) students from institutes like Kellogg School of Management, Yale School of Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business, The Wharton School, Foster School of Business, INSEAD, Oxford University MBAs and FMS, Delhi among others.
Alankrita Pandey, currently doing PhD in Strategic HR Management from the University of Texas at Arlington, USA, signed the oath as an MBA from FMS, Delhi. She says, “I have always felt the need for an oath of this kind. Well, ideally one should be ethical oath or not, but with the profession being tainted by corporate greed and so many scams, it is important to think about the consequences of actions not only money wise but ethical implication wise. I graduated from FMS in 2003 just after the corporate scandals messes hit the fan. I think the oath is timely, in raising awareness about the responsibility MBAs have. Ethics is one of my areas of research interest too.”
The site mbaoath.org says, “We are a group of second-year students from Harvard Business School. We aren’t from the administration. We aren’t from the student government. We aren’t part of any formal group. Yet, we are a group of MBA candidates who want our degree to mean something more than it currently does.” It also talks about its goal to make the movement a widespread one, so that MBAs are respected for their integrity, professionalism, and leadership.
The HBS Class of 2009 students in the site say two events challenged them to reflect even more deeply on what it means to be a manager, a leader, and a professional, “The first was the Harvard Business School’s 100th anniversary and the other and more serious one was the global financial crisis.” These students took help from two HBS professors, Ramesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria, who are already working with the World Economic Forum and the Aspen Institute to create a ‘Hippocratic Oath for Managers’.
This format of the code, which might be used by global MBAs as a credo, will be on the lines of the one’s made by doctors and lawyers before starting their services.
Khurana and Nohria in an article on harvardbusiness.org say, “The claim that managers are professionals does not withstand scrutiny when you compare management with true professions such as medicine and law. Unlike doctors or lawyers, managers don’t need a formal education, let alone a license, to practice.” The article points towards the need to create a global MBA code of conduct and says, “There’s no universally accepted set of professional values backed up by a governing body with the power to censure managers who deviate from the code.”
But can an oath change the way the MBAs think or act? Will the current breed of ‘pledged’ MBAs make any difference to the current state of things? Max Anderson, one of the students of the MBA Oath group, says, “There are no easy answers or silver bullets for fixing things, but the oath is a small step in the right direction. It’s a reorientation of our values from ‘me’ to ‘we’. I hope we can find ways to make it continually poignant and powerful for everyone who takes the oath over time.”
Excerpts of the MBA Oath (source: mbaoath.org)
Some of the key points included in the oath are:
• 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 behaviour that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.
• I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.
• I will be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.
