MBA and Ethics

In the spring of 2009, when Bernie Madoff’s massive scam still felt raw and shocking, a few members of Harvard B-School’s graduating class decided to take a stand. They would sign a kind of Hippocratic oath for MBAs, promising, among other things, to “act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.” By graduation in June, slightly under half of their 886 classmates had joined them. To put the glass-half-empty spin on it, that means most of the students at Harvard B-school didn’t even grasp the basics in their ethics classes.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not that MBAs can’t learn ethics. Maybe it’s just that B-schools are very bad at teaching it.

MBA ethics classes tend to focus on training students to recognize what’s right and wrong. Most of the ethics analysts say the standard approach fails to address the real problem. In most real-life business situations, you already know what’s right. The hard part is figuring out how to act on that knowledge without jeopardizing your career. Often, it’s just easier to justify bending the rules.

A lot of MBA Students think about the easiest way to deal with an ethical situation was to avoid it. But it is not possible all the time. Using this approach, you have a little more ammunition to deal with an ethically questionable situation at work.