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Corporate malfeasance not a surprise
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Harvard Professor Rakesh Khurana, who teaches a doctoral seminar on management and is an expert on the CEO labor market, writes caustically that we should not be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. He advocates rejuvenating intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.
Khurana contends that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have retreated from that goal, leaving a moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself. MBA-driven programs, he believes, have a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share of profits.
The original idea when the managerial elite began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law, constituting business as a profession, ran into problems with codifying the knowledge and developing enforceable standards of conduct.
To deal with these qualification issues in many fields, the law has stepped in. To sell real estate or insurance, or do plumbing and electrical work, it is necessary to meet educational and testing requirements in order to be licensed. Some 50 years ago the public relations field created an accreditation program to add some luster to their endeavors.
To some in the hierarchy of the business world the idea of professional standards for executives might seem impractical or even inimical to free enterprise, but continued debate on this subject can be expected.
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