What's Wrong with the MBA?
Trae Wallace MBA'10
Issue date: 5/12/09 Section: Opinion
To give credit where credit's due, I want to say that I am getting out of my MBA experience exactly what I hoped for when I decided to come to business school. In that sense there is nothing wrong with the MBA. Unfortunately, in the time since I made that decision, the world has changed and what I believe we need out of an MBA has changed as well.
It's becoming clearer every day that the economic crisis has shaken society's faith in managers' ability to run their companies in a way that doesn't harm the overall economy. I'm not talking about the Madoffs, the clear criminals whom we can all feel good condemning. Rather, I'm talking about managers who acted completely within the law and within the philosophy and ethics of the management profession and yet endangered the worldwide financial system. Our inability to condemn or even criticize these actions within the framework of business ethics is a serious crisis in our profession and one that threatens the role of managers as primary actors in the economy.
Imagine what would happen to the medical profession if its governing philosophy allowed a doctor to harm a patient as long as the individual doctor felt it ethical to do so. Most doctors would do no such thing; their personal ethics wouldn't allow it. But if the few that did purposely harm patients were vociferously defended by their colleagues and the profession refused to change its philosophy, then society would rightly step in and limit the autonomy of all doctors. Since outsiders can't reasonably expect to change the philosophy of a profession, they would have to achieve this through minute regulations designed to ensure that no doctor ever had the chance to harm a patient.
This analogy is far from perfect, but it captures the basic dynamics of how a profession can lose the trust of society and what happens when it does. The fact is that a few high-profile managers have run their firms in ways that have proven incredibly harmful to society and yet these managers are viewed as perfectly ethical by those in the profession. In light of this, society's only rational response would be to limit the autonomy of management even though doing so will undermine the foundations of economic growth and hamper if not, kill many of the vibrant and dynamic firms - led by strong and ethical managers - which we all hope to lead someday.
It's becoming clearer every day that the economic crisis has shaken society's faith in managers' ability to run their companies in a way that doesn't harm the overall economy. I'm not talking about the Madoffs, the clear criminals whom we can all feel good condemning. Rather, I'm talking about managers who acted completely within the law and within the philosophy and ethics of the management profession and yet endangered the worldwide financial system. Our inability to condemn or even criticize these actions within the framework of business ethics is a serious crisis in our profession and one that threatens the role of managers as primary actors in the economy.
Imagine what would happen to the medical profession if its governing philosophy allowed a doctor to harm a patient as long as the individual doctor felt it ethical to do so. Most doctors would do no such thing; their personal ethics wouldn't allow it. But if the few that did purposely harm patients were vociferously defended by their colleagues and the profession refused to change its philosophy, then society would rightly step in and limit the autonomy of all doctors. Since outsiders can't reasonably expect to change the philosophy of a profession, they would have to achieve this through minute regulations designed to ensure that no doctor ever had the chance to harm a patient.
This analogy is far from perfect, but it captures the basic dynamics of how a profession can lose the trust of society and what happens when it does. The fact is that a few high-profile managers have run their firms in ways that have proven incredibly harmful to society and yet these managers are viewed as perfectly ethical by those in the profession. In light of this, society's only rational response would be to limit the autonomy of management even though doing so will undermine the foundations of economic growth and hamper if not, kill many of the vibrant and dynamic firms - led by strong and ethical managers - which we all hope to lead someday.
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