The Oath Project

Why the MBA Oath Was Created

oath_admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:51:18 +0000

The following is reposted on behalf of the MBA Oath—one of our founding partners. It was written by Max Anderson one of the founders of the MBA Oath and a graduate of Harvard Business School.

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.

Should Managers Have a Green Hippocratic Oath?

oath_admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:42:33 +0000

The following is reposted with permission from two of the founding Oath Project board members: Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria. Rakesh Khurana is an associate professor of business administration in the organizational behavior area at Harvard Business School. Nitin Nohria was the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean and director of faculty development at Harvard Business School when this blog was posted and is now the dean of the Harvard Business School.

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.

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oath_admin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:37:56 +0000

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oath_admin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:37:39 +0000

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