This past spring a group of MBA graduates from Harvard Business School initiated the MBA Oath. It’s website boasts 1712 signatories and has as its “long-term goal” transforming the field of business management into a “true profession” on the same model as is used by doctors and lawyers.
The oath contains a preamble and eight commitments. The preamble states in part, “I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face difficult choices.” Thus, it appears the writers see their ethics as socially determined, flowing from balanced interests. The website reinforces this theme, indicating a signer joins “a group of like-minded MBA students who believe in a greater purpose for society that the MBA is designed to serve.” The oath does not say how to resolve conflicts with those who define “greater purpose” differently or who reject the idea of reconciling interests altogether.
The picture gets even more complicated when one considers all the political and economic issues business people will encounter. For example, the seventh commitment states, “I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide. Sustainable prosperity is created when the enterprise produces an output in the long run that is greater than the opportunity cost of all the inputs it consumes.”
The priorities a person or a people place on “sustainability” and the opportunity value of inputs can vary widely based on economic circumstances and even culture or belief system. One sees these conflicts between the Chinese and the West today. As stated in the FAQ section of the website, “Business ethics and appropriate behaviors in today’s complex environment are naturally difficult to define with a hard and fast set of rules.”
Signers are currently limited to holders of an MBA, and other managers are excluded. As the website states, “One of the original purposes of the MBA Oath is to raise the bar on what the MBA degree means and what the management profession should hold itself accountable to. Also, it is meant to offer a new way for graduating MBA students to think about their approach to conducting business. We understand many managers in the business world that do not have an MBA; it is not the intent of this organization to set a standard for all.”
This statement seems to contradict the stated long-term goal of professionalizing the entire field. And Andrew Sridhar has argued business does not meet the traditional definition of a profession, and he points out successful managers who did not hold MBAs.
In their Harvard Business Review article, “It’s Time to Make Management a True Profession,” Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria agree, “Unlike doctors and lawyers, managers don’t need a formal education, let alone a license, to practice. Nor do they adhere to a universal and enforceable code of conduct.”
The questions Khurana and Nohria ask in their article—“Would formalizing management education make individual managers more effective? More generally, how would creating a professional pool of consistently trained managers affect the entrepreneurial activity that drives economic growth? Could we reach a consensus on a set of common standards that would be plausibly enforceable? Would having such a code have any impact on behavior?"—still have to be answered.
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