At first thought you probably don’t immediately associate “corporate responsibility”, “sustainability”, or really even “business ethics” with the software industry; and you don’t likely expect a software company to be at the forefront of green building, electric car charging stations, fully compostable dining wear or tela-presence technology.  Well, at least I didn’t.

Not until, I had the pleasure of touring SAP’s campus first hand.  It was fascinating to hear about how they had to make the business case within their company in the beginning and to hear about how their two CEO model fit into the mix—both of whom believed in and backed the sustainability focus but for very different reasons (mainly financial versus community engagement as a responsibility).  The tour of their facilities was nothing short of amazing.  You name it—they knew about it, had weighed the environmental, social, ethical, and financial costs of implementing (or not implementing it) and are leading the charge in green building, energy, and sustainable technologies in one of the most sustainably innovative regions of the world.

There is a great deal of evidence that they are, in fact, an “exemplar” in their commitments to sustainable practices, buildings, and staff initiatives. I had a candid discussion about how it is pretty easy for them to be sustainable in their operations and how they do not have a huge footprint relatively speaking when it comes to making their products and running their businesses.  Their biggest footprint is in their travel—which they are making huge strides to eliminate without sacrificing the integrity of their interactions through the tela-presence meeting spaces, other proprietary software, and their focus on employee health, work-life balance, productivity etc.

But, perhaps the biggest “aha moment” for me was when they spoke about their role as an “enabler” within the sustainability space.  Their core business is software—and they have done a great job of clarifying their responsibility and identifying how their core competencies can best be leveraged within their sphere of influence.  The two biggest takeaways for me were: 1) they understand the impact they can have with the companies they work with (which for all intents and purposes is almost everyone) and 2) they understand that the biggest hurdle to making any real change hinges on the ability to gather, measure, and demonstrate sustainability metrics.  It didn’t hit me until a few days later—but they are really in a position to curtail so many of the biggest hurdles for companies trying to create shared value.  So much of the criticism and the name calling in matters of corporate social sustainability and living beyond the letter of the law/code/ethical requirements (and the list goes on…) is centered on the inability to accurately report and capture the value—to any of the stakeholders.  SAP’s mission is to create software that does all of the labor, time, and resource intensive measurement so that companies can actually spend their time and resources analyzing the initiatives, reflecting on how they fit within their bigger strategy, and doing work that makes an actual difference.

Thank you SAP for reminding me of so many ways that a corporation can live the concepts imbedded in the oath—and for doing your part to help lead the way.

Signing The Oath may have felt like a no-brainer. You have always seen yourself as a values-driven leader in whatever you have undertaken and this was just one more way to acknowledge that fact.

Or perhaps, on the other hand, it felt like a profound and serious moment as you embark upon a career in business, your first experience with publicly claiming a commitment to a professional purpose driven by positive values.

Either way, that’s nice…but now what?

At its best, signing The Oath can be a way to strengthen your own resolve and to feel part of a larger community of similarly motivated individuals. On the downside, some would say that, without some additional support, this oath can be an empty, albeit well-intended, gesture. The real question is, how can we implement our commitment?

That’s where “Giving Voice To Values” (GVV) comes in.

GVV is a ground-breaking new approach (curriculum and pedagogy) to prepare business managers and leaders for values-driven decision making. GVV identifies the many ways that individuals can – and do – voice their values in the workplace and provides opportunities to build the muscles necessary to do so.

Most people want to bring their whole selves to work. Yet, experience and research demonstrate that values conflicts will occur during the course of a person’s career—those times when what we believe and want to accomplish seems in opposition to the demands of clients, peers, bosses and/or organizations. Focused on emerging leaders in the corporate sector, the GVV curriculum helps people build and practice the understanding and skills they need to recognize, speak and act on their values when these conflicts arise—so that after you sign the oath you have the tools to act in alignment with it.

Each month in the “Monthly Moment” we will be highlighting a company that we feel is truly living the tenents of the oath.  I have to admit, I was nervous when I had this idea.  Would I be able to find enough companies?  Would I have to scour the news to double check they were actually not living the oath in other ways?  Would I only be able to highlight CSR programs or philanthropic endeavors? My fears have been put to rest.  I am writing this excerpt on the heels of what may very well be the most inspirational professional experience of my career—but at the very least one that has reminded me of just how relevant, timely, and needed the work we are doing is.

I had the pleasure of spending the week getting a first hand view of how the Arison group (and many of their subsidiaries) are truly changing the face of business.  They are proving, in a number of ways, that “doing good is good business.”  I have to say that it was a much needed and refreshing look at how values do, in fact, have a place in the business world.

We heard story after story of making the business case for doing good—be it for the environment, the community, the customer, or the employee.  I saw passion emanate from CEOs of a variety of business lines as they spoke about how they were skeptical at first, but now wouldn’t think of approaching business any other way.  Not because they have turned into tree hugging hippies or turned over a new leaf in terms of what they want to do with their lives, but because they have come to see how values based business is better business.  We saw hard nosed facts of raising revenues, cutting costs, and increased ROI in addition to some inspirational stories of winning bids and beating out the “big guys” or the “traditionally favored company” because of their transparent business practices, comprehensive stakeholder approach and innovative win-win view on sustainability.

Since many of us are born skeptics or semi-jaded professionals always looking for the angle or simply trained to always question the motivations—I feel it necessary to mention that we learned of many of these experiences in an organic, unplanned, unrehearsed manner while doing research on other areas of the businesses.

The Oath Project has teamed up with Arison to take a harder look at their approach and to create opportunities for others to learn from their refreshing take on global business centered on mutual gains, collaboration, shifting mindsets, and shared value.  I watched first hand as our faculty team went from slight (and reasonable) skepticism to true inspiration.  I watched them take frantic notes on the many scenarios ripe for case studies and class discussion—almost giddy with the realization that companies can embody what they preach, still do quite well financially, and in many cases cut through red tape and long seeded bureaucracy.

The week showed me that business is changing and that it is in fact possible to have fully integrated values that protect the right of future generations and respect the dignity of all people affected by an organization—and still turn a nice profit.  I listened as innovative and forward thinking leaders shared how their respective businesses were rewarded with big contract wins and large revenues because they refrained from corruption, unfair competition, and businesses practices harmful to society—when no one was looking, when no one would have known.  I witnessed top level management being compensated 50% on implementation of values and 50% on business results—and having it actually work.  But, perhaps what I was most impressed by was how managers from a variety of levels within the organizations understood that their behavior must set an example of integrity and judging from my interaction with their direct reports it seems to truly be eliciting trust and esteem from those they serve. 

Stay tuned for further details and research into how this investment group, and their bank, salt manufacturing company, water efficiency company, and infrastructure company are truly shifting the way business is done.  Not to mention the other incredible work being done through their more traditional philanthropic arms.  Thank you Arison for leading the way—with your personal and professional integrity in tact.

If the purpose of medicine is to improve health, and of law, justice, what is the purpose of management?  I have asked this question to hundreds of MBA students for the last decade and the responses don’t cease to surprise (or even shock) me.  To some, the central purpose of the profession they are training for is to “maximize shareholder value”.  To others it is to “maximize profits”.  And, to many, the question itself is irrelevant, or even worse, absurd.

I routinely ask the same students “who are their business idols?” – the role models they would love to emulate.   I ask what it is about those individuals that they admire so much.  Some cite Apple’s Steve Jobs, because he transformed personal computing and made it affordable, accessible and beautiful.  Others bring up Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin because they made the dream of universal access to information a reality and because they continue to come up with amazing services at no cost.  I also hear Henry Ford, who helped normal citizens own a car and who helped create modern management techniques that radically improved productivity.  Or Warren Buffett, for his responsible, long-term approach to investing that has produced billions of dollars in value.

We admire business leaders who create products that make our lives better, who innovate, who find ways to do things more efficiently.  But when asked why we choose to dedicate our professional lives to managing businesses we either can’t answer, or at best, confuse the means with the ends.  This disconnect has been a cause of great concern to me.

For management to occupy its rightful place among the learned professions, for it to be looked at as an honorable calling, a respected and technically complex occupation that can be personally rewarding and socially useful, it is paramount that we deliberately and concisely articulate an inspiring purpose.

That’s what The Oath tries to do in its preamble: it reminds us that at its very core, managers bring together other people and other people’s resources and organizes them in ways that are valuable to all parties involved.

I am part of a team of 25 graduating Harvard MBAs who created the MBA Oath, pledging to lead professional careers marked with integrity and ethics. My classmates and I are aware of the low opinion many people have of MBAs, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. We don’t want to be known as the least respected profession in America (though some polls say MBAs hold that distinction). We want to be known as professionals, who look after the best interests of their clients, customers, employees and shareholders.

Our goal is to begin a widespread movement of MBAs who aim to lead in the interests of the greater good and who have committed to living out the principles articulated in the Oath. This year, U.S. schools will award more than 100,000 MBA degrees, more than twice the number of law degrees and medical degrees combined. And yet the MBA does not make you a professional like these other degrees do. What if it did?

The oath began as a voluntary, opt-in grassroots initiative among our classmates to get 100 HBS students to sign by graduation. We based our oath language largely on a draft of an oath completed by Professors Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana in the Harvard Business Review last October, with a few edits of our own. We thought 100, or more than 10% of the class, would have symbolic power. As of June 8, 2009, more than 50% of Harvard’s graduating MBA class has signed the oath. Beyond Harvard, more than 200 students at other business schools, from Stanford to Wharton to Oxford, have also signed the Oath. Just this week, we received a request to translate the oath into Spanish for an MBA program in Colombia.

The oath is a voluntary pledge for graduating MBAs to create value responsibly and ethically. The oath begins with the following premise and conclusion:

“As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can build alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term.”

We hope the Oath will accomplish three things: a) make a difference in the lives of the students who take the oath, b) challenge other classmates to work with a higher professional standard, whether they sign the oath or not and c) create a public conversation in the press about professionalizing and improving management. The third goal may be the easiest to measure. We’ve been featured on NPR, the Economist, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and countless blogs. Whether they agree with us or not, people are talking about business’s duties to society, which we think is a healthy development.

As for the first two goals, only time will tell. The power of the oath is not in the moment of taking it, but in the thousands of decisions which are later influenced by the oath. Substantial research suggests that public commitments of this kind do influence behavior, even in the absence of a “stick” to punish non-conformity to the principles. That said, we are exploring ideas to give the oath some “teeth” in the form of peer accountability and welcome any suggestions.

We are hopeful that this is an important, if small, step towards professionalizing management, restoring public trust in MBAs, and building a more ethical, thoughtful business culture.

Widespread recognition of climate change and other major environmental problems has made it clear that the next generation of corporate leaders will be forced to grapple with a set of enormously complex and important issues. Given how business activities affect the environment, should new managers be asked to take an oath similar to the ones that doctors recite–requiring business leaders to first do no harm, including harm to the environment? Harvard Business School professors Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria say that they should, and encourage you to help them write such an oath.

The once unassailable notion that corporations exist solely to maximize their shareholders’ returns is crumbling. Without a doubt, the dramatic scale and scope of the challenges presented by climate change will require the next generation of business leaders to adopt a more socially oriented professional identity. Recently, Bill Gates has called for a new “creative capitalism.”Where once it was enough to simply deliver results to the bottom line, Gates noted, the next generation of managers will be held responsible for decisions that have effects far beyond their corporations and the markets they serve.

To prepare new managers for the challenges that await them, dramatic changes in their education and training will be necessary. Business school courses will need to incorporate facts and decision-making frameworks that go beyond the conventional market logic that now dominates the MBA curriculum. Students will need to learn how to incorporate environmental and social goals in decision making. They will also need to break away from misleading and simplistic ideas that caricature managers as the hired hands of shareholders.

Management, in other words, will have to become more like the learned professions of medicine and law. Professions such as these are, at least in theory, characterized by an orientation to serving society–and they have something the profession of management does not have–a normative code or oath that encourages leaders to consider the broader implications of their actions. Most professional codes, including the modern version of the ancient Hippocratic oath for doctors, clearly articulate the higher aims and social purposes of the profession and the norms of conduct that should govern members’ behavior in pursuing these purposes.

A management oath should be created to encourage business leaders to be aware of the broader implications of their actions, including those related to the environment. Simply survey the history of management or business schools’ curricula, and you will see that the notion that corporations have a responsibility to society is not a new idea, simply a forgotten one. Perhaps the frightening and complex issue of climate change will serve as a wake up call for managers and business educators, spurring them to create their own code of conduct.