[Corp. Watch] It's the corporate culture, stupid

[Corporation Watch]

Training Managers to Behave

By Justin Fox
(Time magazine, May 14) -- It's commencement day at the Thunderbird  
School of Global Management, a highly regarded if off-the-beaten-track  
business school housed on a former military base (Thunderbird Field)  
in Glendale, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix.

	The 279 graduates have gathered on a May afternoon in a convention  
center next door to the Arizona Cardinals football stadium. After a  
presentation of the flags of 35 nations and a speech by school  
president Angel Cabrera, something unusual happens.

	"As a Thunderbird and a global citizen, I promise ...," Cabrera  
begins. The graduates repeat after him. Then the recitation continues:

... I will strive to act with honesty and integrity. I will respect  
the rights and dignity of all people. I will strive to create  
sustainable prosperity worldwide. I will oppose all forms of  
corruption and exploitation. And I will take responsibility for my  
actions. As I hold true to these principles, it is my hope that I may  
enjoy an honorable reputation and peace of conscience.

	This is the Thunderbird Oath of Honor, the unlikely leading edge of  
an assault on business as usual at business schools. It's part of a  
broader rethinking of the balance between doing well and doing good  
that could reshape the economy and the workplace in coming years -- or  
could just stay a debating point.

	Business schools, Thunderbird president Cabrera and his fellow rebels  
contend, are ethical wastelands partly to blame for the Wall Street  
collapse of the past year. And even those who defend B-schools don't  
claim that they're moral beacons.

	Debating Cabrera in April at the annual convention of the Association  
to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), Purdue business  
school Dean Richard Cosier attributed the crisis to "personal greed"  
and too much debt.

	"Personal greed reflects personal values," Cosier asserted when I  
spoke to him on the phone a few days later, "and you can't blame  
business schools for determining personal value systems."

	There was a time, in the first half of the 20th century, when  
business schools did try to instill values and norms. They aimed to  
establish a profession of management that took its cues from medicine  
and the law.

	That effort fizzled by the 1970s, says Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard  
Business School professor whose 2007 history, 'From Higher Aims to  
Hired Hands', chronicles the shift.

	Khurana, a close ally of Cabrera's, argues that business schools have  
become trade schools focused on securing the highest-paying jobs for  
their graduates. "If you wonder why CEOs spend so much time thinking  
about whether their bathrooms are up to par," Khurana says, "look at  
the business schools they went to."

	Khurana was a keynote speaker at the April AACSB convention, and he  
doesn't think his message went over well. "Two hours of making 1,200  
people squirm in their seats" is how he describes it.

	And it's not just business educators who squirm at the idea of  
management as a profession. When I mentioned it to a lawyer friend, he  
scoffed, "It doesn't work unless you have a professional exam, a  
licensing board and exposure to malpractice."

	Cabrera and Khurana agree. "The biggest question -- and we don't know  
the answer -- is how are we going to institutionalize this?" Cabrera  
says. We're a long way from a world where you could lose your  
management license for taking shortcuts to meet a quarterly-earnings  
target. But we do have the Thunderbird Oath.

	Cabrera, a Spaniard with a psychology Ph.D. from Georgia Tech,  
introduced a similar oath as dean of a business school in Madrid, but  
it was abandoned after he left in 2004. In hopes of making the concept  
stick at Thunderbird, he put students in charge of writing the oath  
and getting faculty and trustee approval.

	Applicants to Thunderbird must write an essay discussing the oath,  
and students say it often comes up in class. A few don't love it. One  
student circulated an essay this Spring declaring his unwillingness to  
sign or recite the "insulting" and "tacky" oath.

	Not that it kept him from graduating: Even at Thunderbird, making  
ethical promises mandatory is still seen as beyond the business-school  
pale.