Steven Harper, in AM Law Daily, wonders why an ethics-minded business school dean thinks so highly of lawyers.
Last Tuesday, Nitin Nohria was named the new dean of Harvard Business School.
In leading the school, Professor Nohria will focus “on business ethics, a cause he has long championed, particularly during the financial crisis,” as The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Nohria also has been, as the Journal describes him, “vocal critic of management education and the leaders it produces.”
… As the great recession deepened, Nohria and a colleague, Rakesh Khurana, argued in the October 2008 Harvard Business Review that management should become a profession: “Managers have lost legitimacy over the past decade in the face of a widespread institutional breakdown of trust and self-policing in business. To regain society’s trust, we believe that business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond their responsibility to the shareholder to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians. In other words, it is time that management finally became a profession.”
It might surprise many attorneys that Nohria singled out lawyers as offering a better model. He did so largely because the legal profession abides by a code of ethics. Is he searching for nobility in the business world? If so, maybe Nohria has a fictional character in mind–Atticus Finch. Unfortunately, it’s too late for the most lucrative and influential segment of the legal profession to guide business schools to better places.
For 20 years now, large law firms have been moving in the direction Nohria seeks to reverse in the business world. Following the example of their corporate clients, law firm leaders have adopted an MBA-centric mentality. In recent years, a large percentage of law firm managers have earned MBAs. And increasingly, they have come to rely on business-school metrics — billable hours, leverage ratios, and profits-per-partner–to dictate decisions that shape the culture of their legal businesses.
… If Dean Nohria is looking for a new model of something that is truly a profession, rather than a collection of bottom-line businesses where MBA-type metrics set the tone, he’ll have to look elsewhere.
May 11th, 2010 at 5:01PM
What is brown and looks good on a lawyer?
May 12th, 2010 at 5:01PM
There are some COMPANIES that take ethical managerial behavior very seriously. I’d say that is the case at 3M where I worked for ten years in the eighties. I note that at that time most of the really good managers were not MBAs.
I remember two individuals especially. One, when I reported an incident of sexual harrassment that I witnessed, RAN from my lab to take care of the situation immediately.
And I have fond memories of another manager who we called Dr. No because he was very tight with money. But he came down to the labs from mahogany row to talk to the peons and if you could make a really good case for money, he would cough it up. He once took care of a problem for me in about two weeks. A similar problem at the U of M took me more than two years to get settled.
The overall ethical standards at 3M are a lot higher than they are at the University of Minnesota and a lot of other universities. And this culture didn’t comefrom lawyers or business school ethics classes. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend that someone work there.
But, perhaps things have changed…