Resources

Below are some general resources surrounding the movement. If you are interested in bringing the oath to your school, please contact us here and we will send you an official toolkit.

Articles Multimedia
  • A Hippocratic Oath for business?
  • Breakthrough Ideas for 2004: The HBR List
  • Comments on Glenn Hubbard’s Business, Knowledge, and Global Growth
  • Corporate Honesty and Business Education: A Behavioral Model
  • Eric Cornuel: Shareholders vs. Stakeholders
  • Is Business Management a Profession?
  • It’s Time to Make Management a True Profession
  • Professionalizing global management for the twenty-first century
  • Werner Vogt: Rather a case for more checks and balances
  • You Got a License to Run That Company?
  • Bring the Oath to Your School
  • MBA Oath video
  • YGLs reciting the Oath
Papers
  • From Social Control to Financial Economics
  • Harvard Business School and the Making of a New Profession
  • Restoring Trust in Business: Models for Action
  • The CFA Program: Our Fifth Decade

Below are all of the resources listed in reverse chronological order:

Assignment: Masters in Business

Author:
Ed ButlerSource:
BBC World ServicePublication Date:
September 13, 2009
Summary:What role did the business schools play in last year’s financial crisis? In this week’s edition of Assignment, Ed Butler investigates whether, as the chair of Harvard’s MBA programme insists, the schools were guilty only of teaching a deficient assessment of risk in the business world, or whether there had been a more fundamental fault. Some inside the system tell Assignment that there had been a growing disconnect between the schools and society, with insufficient attention being paid to the ethics of the business world, and the sole focus of the programmes being on maximising shareholder value and personal enrichment.
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Why We Created the MBA Oath

Author:
Max AndersonSource:
Harvard Business ReviewPublication Date:
June 8, 2009
Summary:Max Anderson is part of a team of 25 graduating Harvard MBAs who created the MBA Oath, pledging to lead professional careers marked with integrity and ethics. 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?
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It’s Time to Make Management a True Profession

Author:
Rakesh KhuranaNitin NohriaSource:
Harvard Business ReviewPublication Date:October, 2008
Summary:In the face of the recent institutional breakdown of trust in business, managers are losing legitimacy. To regain public trust, management needs to become a true profession in much the way medicine and law have, argue Khurana and Nohria of Harvard Business School. True professions have codes, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education required of their members.
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From Social Control to Financial Economics

Author:
Marion FourcadeRakesh KhuranaSource:
Harvard Business SchoolPublication Date:
September 23, 2008
Summary:This article draws on historical material to analyze the changing place of economics in American business education over the course of the twentieth century.
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Should Managers Have a Green Hippocratic Oath?

Author:
Rakesh KhuranaSource:
Harvard Business IdeaCastPublication Date:
April 10, 2008
Summary:Interview with Rakesh Khurana talking about his work with Nitin Nohria on a Hippocratic Oath for business.
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Should Managers Have a Green Hippocratic Oath?

Author:
Rakesh KhuranaNitin NohriaSource:
HBRGreen.orgPublication Date:
April 1, 2008
Summary: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?
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Corporate Honesty and Business Education: A Behavioral Model

Author:
Herbert GintisRakesh KhuranaSource:
Moral Markets, Princeton University PressPublication Date:
April 1, 2008
Summary:Chapter Fourteen: Corporate Honesty and Business Education: A Behavioral Model by Herbert Gintis and Rakesh Khurana. We suggest that a corporate culture based on character virtues, together with owner-manager relationships predicated in part on reciprocity and mutual regard, could improve both the moral character of business and the profitability of corporate enterprise.
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The CFA Program: Our Fifth Decade

Author:Robert R. JohnsonJan R. SquiresPeter B. MackeyBobby LamySource:CFA Institute Publication Date:2008 Summary:The purpose of this article is to describe the CFA Program process in detail. You will learn how the CBOK and curriculum are established, how the examinations are developed and administered, and finally, how the examinations are graded and the minimum passing score is determined.
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Comments on Glenn Hubbard’s Business, Knowledge, and Global Growth

Author:
Rakesh KhuranaScott SnookSource:
Capitalism and SocietyPublication Date:
2006
Summary:It is easy to become self-satisfied and readily dismiss legitimate criticisms about business education as ill-informed attacks from anti-business minorities. Indeed, as Dean Hubbard rightly notes at the start of his article, academics are particularly susceptible to hubris. One particularly destructive example of hubris at work may be the fact that we get to pick the metrics upon which our success is measured.
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Harvard Business School and the Making of a New Profession

Author:
Rakesh KhuranaTarun KhannaDaniel PenriceSource:
Harvard Business SchoolPublication Date:
July 21, 2005
Summary:Since its founding in 1908, Harvard Business School ‘s mission has been to perform a much-needed service for American society by turning business management into a profession. The process of formulating “business principles” that would put the study of management on a scientific basis was a crucial part of what the founders had set out to achieve in creating the HBS curriculum and building a faculty.
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Is Business Management a Profession?

Author:Rakesh KhuranaNitin NohriaDaniel PenriceSource:Harvard Business School Working KnowledgePublication Date:February 21, 2005 Summary:Repeated and, as of this writing, ongoing revelations of corporate wrongdoing over the last two years have eroded public trust in business institutions and executives to levels not seen in decades. A recent Gallup poll indicated that Americans now have no more trust in business leaders than they do in Washington politicians! Fairly or not, people have become willing to believe that executives, as a class, are greedy and dishonest.
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Professionalizing global management for the twenty-first century

Author:
Angel CabreraDavid BowenSource:
Harvard Business ReviewPublication Date:
2005
Summary:This paper seeks to argue that global management should be considered by practitioners, educators, regulators and society at large as a true professional discipline. While in its current form it may not meet all the defining criteria of a profession, true professionalism is the best guiding principle as progress is made.
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You Got a License to Run That Company?

Author:
Rakesh KhuranaSource:
Harvard Business ReviewPublication Date:
February 1, 2004
Summary:The article argues that managers of business enterprises should have a higher purpose than just maximizing shareholder returns. The author argues for a redefinition of professionalism; he believes there should be a fundamental reassessment of business education and how well it serves society’s interests.
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Breakthrough Ideas for 2004: The HBR List

Author:Source:
Harvard Business ReviewPublication Date:
February 1, 2004
Summary:HBR’s editors searched for the best new ideas related to the practice of management and came up with a collection that is as diverse as it is provocative. The 2004 HBR List includes emergent concepts from biology, network science, management theory, and more.
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Restoring Trust in Business: Models for Action

Author:Source:
PR CoalitionPublication Date:
September 17, 2003
Summary:The PR Coalition created this document. It challenges corporate America to do three things: adopt ethical principles, pursue transparency and disclosure in everything they do, and make trust a fundamental precept of corporate governance.
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Werner Vogt: Rather a case for more checks and balances

Author:
Werner VogtSource:
HandelsblattPublication Date:
September 8, 2003
Summary:A closer look at the Hippocratic oath in its primary sense will first of all reveal that its original is obsolete in a modern medical world, while any modern version will never be universally accepted, the MBA student in St. Gallen, says.
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Eric Cornuel: Shareholders vs. Stakeholders

Author:
Eric CornuelSource:
HandelsblattPublication Date:
August 20, 2003
Summary:The issue raised by Angel Cabrera is indeed of the utmost importance. The invisible hand system conceptualized by Adam Smith, where the addition of individual selfish behaviours leading to collective well being does not work anymore.
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A Hippocratic Oath for business?

Author:
Angel CabreraSource:
HandelsblattPublication Date:
July 18, 2003
Summary:Is business management a true profession? This is a question that an international group of young leaders faced at a World Economic Forum meeting in Geneva last September. The question, believe it or not, is more than an academic digression. It is an issue that lies at the heart of our conception of business and its role in society.
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