Ethics should not be a 'bolt-on' to a management education
Nov, 2009
A core MBS value is a commitment to good business - both competent and ethical.
We already engage with this value around the school. In October this year we hosted our Gourlay Visiting Professor of Ethics in Business , Professor Ed Freeman from the Darden School at the University of Virginia who has been teaching an elective in ethics.
Our Philosopher-in-Residence, Associate Professor John Armstrong has recently published a new book on the idea of Civilisation. And the school has been engaged in strengthening our Centre for Leadership for Social Impact and exploring further opportunities to conduct research and teaching in the area of ethical leadership.
But I am still not satisfied. As wonderful as these developments are, they still feel peripheral somehow, as though ethics were a bolt-on to a competence-based management education. The very fact that ethics is an elective suggests this. ‘Now you can competently run a business, why not think about how to do it constructively? But only if you want to.'
Of course, this reflects the way our society assesses business. People make investments based on profitability, not the aggregate of economic and social outcomes. But people also value outcomes other than money. Our students come with social concerns and passions that ought to be cultivated and integrated into their future paths, not reduced to hobbies or philanthropic opportunities once they've made their fortune. These are the same concerns and passions that will motivate employees to maximise productivity and fulfilment in their working lives.
A good business education helps students imagine how to do this, not just as an elective or even a core subject, but as something that permeates every subject - an imaginative, constructive element that draws them out as human beings who want to positively impact their world.
And so we need a new paradigm - one that turns the normal perspective on its head. To make good business core to what we do, we need to re-examine underlying assumptions about students we select, what we teach, what expectations we create about the education we offer and how we measure our success.
The ancient origins of formal education, whether the sage mentors of the Ancient Near East or the schools of the Greek Philosophers, envisaged education as essentially a process of moral formation, where the student was wholly engaged in a search for integrity of values and life. There is a wisdom here we would do well to recover, encouraging students to view their personal development as something driven by desires which have a distinctly moral dimension.
If students come to business school wanting to become good businesspeople, they will bring their whole selves, their relationships, their backgrounds, their desires, their morals and their skills to their work. And if we are serious about good business, we will help them imagine how to integrate all those things with the additional knowledge and skills we teach them.
Forming good businesspeople - competent and ethical businesspeople - is my greatest passion. I welcome contributions to the ongoing conversations taking place around these ideas.
Jenny George
Dean and Director
Melbourne Business School
