Business conduct
MBAs will hold responsible positions in many businesses of various size and complexity.
They will be applying their specialist skills and knowledge to an ever changing set of challenges.
Yet MBA qualifications have not always had a good PR recognition, and indeed the worst excesses of MBA behaviour have led to accusations of being a main contributory factor in the demise of large companies ( e.g Enron)
Entrepreneurial MBAs who have started companies from scratch do begrudgingly get a better recognition for their hard work.
Is this general suspicion of MBA qualifications are own fault, or is this a criticism of business generally and MBA criticism is collateral damage?
For me there are several areas in which MBAs can help.
Corporate Social responsibility should be more than doing the minimum that business can get away with and, indeed , MBAs have been taught that there is a moral duty to expect higher standards of business than this. Even small businesses with perhaps fewer resources can ‘ behave ‘ better in the wider environment . We at AMBA like to stress that sustainability and ethical behaviour extends throughout core curriculum and expect these concepts to remain within the MBA mindset throughout the working life.
Philosophically, a ‘good’ citizen is not just compliant with local statutes and there is no law that says ‘corporate citizens’ are exempt from this idea.
When we get to corporate citizens we get into areas like taxation , and taxation is not merely a legal or technical issue and a ‘cost’ to the business but rather a moral issue about that business position in the wider economic and national/international environment in which it operates.
This is an example of ultimately pursuing shareholder value to its extreme without recognising the ‘cost ‘ to society at large and the contribution that taxation revenues make to the wider community. Nowadays society is recognising that tax avoidance can cause reputational damage, so again we come back to sustainability and the issue regarding loss of business through behaviour.
Going back to the larger corporate collapses and MBA involvement, there is no excuse for ‘collaborative silence’ on these matters which are ultimately moral and are concerned with our wider society. I would hope that, if this resonates with current MBA teaching, these issue become agenda items which drive behaviour.
When you are sitting through a finance lecture of following up a CPD course on finance then you may look a different holistic approach to finance and cost/benefit analyses that this sort of thinking brings.
If you realise that the planet is a zero sum profitability model then we may avoid worst excesses of corporate capitalism.
