Harvard: A Hippocratic Oath for Managers?

About a month ago, one of those business students, Maxwell F. Anderson, had had an idea. There should be an MBA oath, in some respects analogous to the famous Hippocratic Oath so famous in medicine. And it should focus on ethics. The message is clear: students are distancing themselves from earlier generations of MBAs, those who so closely identified with financial disasters, especially on Wall Street, the biggest employer of Harvard MBAs in recent years.  
The students' oath is part of more widespread efforts to turn management into a profession akin to those of medical doctors and lawyers. The idea dates back to 2004, when Angel Cabrera, president of Arizona business school, Thunderbird, suggested that his students write one. It soon became an official part of the school’s MBA programme. The notion of an oath for managers resurfaced in a much-discussed article last October in the “Harvard Business Review” by Harvard professors Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria. Is this a great development in business for freshly minted MBAs to voluntarily take a personal ethics oath prior to entering the workforce? Or is such a thing, as many critics declare, an empty gesture and a waste of time, or even an additional opportunity for cynical manipulation of fragile public confidence?
Ever since then one of the two main criticisms of the idea of turning management into a profession is that it is either unnecessary or positively harmful. Crimes such as embezzlement are illegal anyway. Shareholders who feel that managers have not acted in their best interests can sue them. Meanwhile, by promising to “safeguard the interests” of colleagues, customers, and society, are the future captains of industry simply short-changing their shareholders? The second complaint is that the oath is toothless. It is hard to define managing “in good faith” or acting “in an ethical manner”. And how should we punish offenders?
Currently Cabrera, Khurana and Nohria are working with the Aspen Institute and the World Economic Forum to try to work out how to add teeth to the oath. They have discussed ideas such as trying to keep managers apprised of the latest thinking in their field, developing a professional licence for them and setting up an organisation to punish unprofessional behaviour.
Once again critics maintain that no self-regulating professional body for managers should control entry to the profession, given the long list of entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who have created shareholder value without any formal training. Hardly any entrepreneur has an MBA. However, the financial crisis has doubtlessly sparked more scrutiny of managers than ever before. So the idea of students embracing an agenda beyond shareholder value may not be such a bad one after all.

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