the Harvard MBA Oath - A promise to be ethical in an era of Immorality?
Started by second year harvard MBA students as a way to improve B-school ethics, the Harvard “MBA Oath” was signed by over half of the Harvard class of 2009. Quickly, MBAs around the world forwarded the oath to friends and the oath now gathered over 800 signatures to date.
You can find the oath here: http://mbaoath.org/take-the-oath/
While this is an laudable attempt to improve the ethics standard of the MBA population among a string of high profile fraud cases and CEO of failed companies rewarding themselves by large bonuses, I do find that the oath somewhat disturbing. In particular students signing the oath are promising to “act with utmost integrity”, “take responsibility for my actions”, “be accountable to my peers” and “safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate”.
This is quite striking to me - isn’t the behaviour described above normal and expected behaviour? I find it quite disturbing that an oath and a pledge is needed to be “honest”. After talking about it with my classmates, I realised that this may be in fact a key difference that exists in terms of business ethics between the US and Europe.
The World Bank publishes a yearly Global Competitiveness Report with some indications of Corporate Ethics. If you look at the chart below, it seems that the US has a long way to go before reaching Europe’s ethical standards. In fact, the USA is much closer to China in terms of corporate ethics, which I found to be quite interesting after all the noise created around Google in China.