MBA Oath:Harvard Produces Epic Piece of Shit
Posted on 09. May, 2010 by Ajay Goyal in A Rupee a Day, All Write, Management
A group of Harvard business school students have produced a voluntary oath that MBA students can take. I read the oath and its story around the same time I read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short. I also trudged through the celebrated thesis on US sub-prime mortgage market and its collapse by a Harvard graduate A.K.Barnett Hart.
The Lewis book is not so much a story of failure of a financial instrument or of some extraordinary outsiders seeing its weakness and profiting from it by shorting it. It is the the tale of a society that has come unhinged where the brightest and the best educated with finest degrees have no conscience, no honesty, no integrity, no decency and no sense of social responsibility. It is the tale of ten-headed monsters ( Hindu mythological King Ravana) with all the knowledge in the world and a vengeance to match toward all in it.
Now, the institutions that have created the monsters who ate up trillions of dollars of savings and wealth created by hard working people around the world over decades have come up with a hypocritical oath. When just some humility and contrition could have done – here comes an intercontinental ballistic missile loaded with shit.
When Russia was robbed in 1990s Harvard graduates and advisers were at the heart of every fraudulent scheme used to destroy the country. Hedge fund managers and investment advisers that descended on Moscow just after the collapse of Soviet Union will be judged by history to be the financial pedophiles of 20th century. They preyed on a vulnerable and innocent new country and caused untold misery.
Oaths, pledges, vows and lifetime of religious indoctrination has not protected young boys from being preyed upon by priests in churches. If an oath could do it doctors would not kill female fetuses for money, causing over 35 million missing girl children in India. They would not harvest human organs from poor to sell to rich. They wont pump chemicals into people because pharma companies pay them to. Hypocritic oath is overrated. That is not what makes doctors click. Real doctors go to medical profession to help people, they study and continue years of learning to be good at alleviating pain. They have peer review, standards, checks, balances, real oversight and regulations. A doctor cannot destroy life with the impunity a Wall Street Banker can. Harvard Business School is no medical institution.
What business schools need is to demonstrate to students the real effects of economic and business decisions taken over the decades by celebrated CEOs of the world. When Milton Friedman’s mantra is drilled into every budding CEO that only maximization of profit matters – students need to see and feel the other side of profit. Mining corporations executives, oil company honchos and investment bankers do not so much need lectures in international business as in impact of business internationally. A new study to be presented to President Barack Obama this week on cancer states that most instances of cancer are caused by man-made chemicals. So let us measure how many people have profitable chemical companies killed by cancer. Union Carbide, Exxon, BP are all effective and profitable companies. Union Carbide plant in Bhopal killed 25,000 people in one night. Exxon and BP will leave a mark on this planet that only sun, moon and asteroids so far have. Whole species will disappear because of them.
Business schools do not need an oath administered to students. They need to read Miranda Rights to students as live cases and let them spend a night in a high security prison where celebrity junk bond traders and ponzi hedge fund managers famously go in increasing numbers. The thin line between smart schemes and criminality has been obliterated by big business. Business executives need not so much to read corporate finance and statistical modelling as they need to read and re-read Lewis about the utter apathy toward human condition that has become the backbone of big business. That and the moronic mediocrity.
Words like ethics, corporate social responsibility, value, profit, reporting, rating, due-diligence — that form the basis of western capital markets and business need to be redefined.
What is necessary is not an oath but a deeper understanding of good, bad and ugly. When a whole society fails and values of honesty, decency and personal integrity that should be injected by families and schools into children are absent, business schools have a higher responsibility. They need to make people good. They need to protect the MBA graduates from their own high ability to realize what they wish. It is the wishes, the dreams and the values that students come to and leave MBA schools with that need repairing.
Business schools and high seats of learning like Harvard have greater responsibility toward the society than simply adding some lessons and oaths in ethics. They have a duty to describe true meaning of profit, of accounting, of audit, of value creation and destruction, of meaning and implications of an interconnected world where push of a button in New York can have an equal and opposite reaction in Congo and Colorado. They need to teach them that charity music concerts are not the way to help the world. Simple honesty in all you do, wherever you do it, is.
Virtues of honesty, generosity, kindness, prudence, empathy, gratitude and integrity do not become part of human behavior because of a half honest voluntary oath. They need to be made part of human DNA at the finest seats of learning. It starts with Harvard.
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PS: And while you are at it Harvard, you still owe me $15,000 and interest since 1998 when I left my course midway for the shittiest education program I ever attended.
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