Wednesday, February 10, 2010

In honor of Duke/Keralina


I'm pretty excited about this.

Evil MBAs commit to being slightly less evil...

Leave it to HBS to come up with the MBA Oath. Money quote (emphasis added):

"One of Jeff Skilling's classmates has recalled a comment the ex-CEO of Enron made during a class about a dangerous consumer product: "I'd keep making and selling [it]. My job as a business man is to...maximize return to the shareholders. It's the government's job to step in if a product is dangerous."

As a student today at Harvard's business school, I hear echoes of those comments from my classmates."

Yikes. The author goes on:

"In their reverence for the individual, business schools are remarkably bad at creating a sense of common purpose beyond an ambition to make money. Without a higher calling, bad actors flourish and those who want to speak out against them have little basis on which to challenge them."

With much love to my HBS chums, this is not the way things are at all top business schools. And honestly, I can't imagine that (outside of a small, perhaps vocal element) that this isn't what it's really like at HBS either...is it?