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“Ethics education is carried out at the workplace. Forget the classroom.”

Uh-oh. So what do we do with the growing battalion of business ethics professors battering their incorruptibility into the stubbornly corrupt hearts of MBA students? Batter my heart, twelve-person’d ethics faculty, as John Donne might put it; yet if Annabel Beerel (the kind of name Vladimir Nabokov would have loved – it’s like a word game involving coming up with a name using the smallest number of letters) is right –

Most MBAs have their sights on gargantuan salaries and huge share options. Any discussion regarding excess CEO pay, for example, even when the company has clearly lost significant market value over a sustained period, is typically shrugged off with, “Well whatever is legal is OK.”

– and that’s only one of many points Beerel makes on the way to arguing that – as her headline has it – ETHICS TRAINING DOESN’T WORK.

Franchement, UD thinks she must be right, given all the battered by morally superior forces Wharton and Harvard MBAs out there insider trading and all.

But, with America’s large number of exquisitely, expensively educated white-collar crooks in mind, which business school will dare announce We’re firing our Force for Good and doing what UD‘s been, for years, saying we should do. We’re starting a speakers series featuring jailed miscreants who might scare at least a few of our students straight. I don’t see this happening. Amid the current crime-spree, B-Schools are compelled to look as though they’re doing something.

Margaret Soltan, February 22, 2014 12:48PM
Posted in: beware the b-school boys

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2 Responses to ““Ethics education is carried out at the workplace. Forget the classroom.””

  1. Daniel S. Goldberg Says:
    February 22nd, 2014 at 4:28PM

    Although we disagree on the possibility of teaching ethics, I absolutely adore the phrase “Batter my heart, twelve-person’d ethics faculty.”

    I will quote repeatedly, with attribution.

    Wonderful!

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:
    February 22nd, 2014 at 4:31PM

    Thanks, Daniel.

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