Hello friends,
After listening a lot of things regarding ethics in the lectures and in the panel discussion. I thought a lot during my free time....Regarding this issue.(as u all know we have ample of free time these days).
There were many good points raised during panel discussion - How the factors like customer expectations, competitive forces, greed and shareholder’s expectations motivate companies to take unethical steps and gives multiplier effect to frauds & scandals.
If we focus on all the scandals from Enron to Satyam we can easily resolve that in all the cases the problem was not there with marketing strategy or financial modeling or in operations the problem was with the motive and intentions of its top level executives whose greed took these companies to bankruptcy. And same with the financial crisis which forced world economy into recession
So question comes who should be held responsible for all this?
“Time after time, and scandal after scandal, it seems that a school that graduates just 500 students a year finds itself in the thick of it. Yet there is remarkably little contribution. ….You can draw up a list of the greatest entrepreneurs of recent history, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and Bill Gates of Microsoft, to Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Lakshmi Mittal — and there’s not an MBA between them.
Yet the MBA industry continues to grow, and business schools provide vital income to academic institutions: 500,000 people around the world now graduate each year with an MBA.
Given the present chaos, shouldn’t we be asking if business education is not just a waste of time, but actually damaging to our economic health?One can read two separate propositions into the above quote. The stronger one is that B-schools serve no particular purpose. The milder one is that B-school curricula are inadequate and in some ways responsible for much that is wrong today in the world of business.
The first proposition is easily dealt with. Whether B-schools are useful is one of those debates that will never end — like debates on death penalty, globalization and same sex marriages. Every one of these issues was hotly debated during my soft skills classes in the 3rd semester but do they make any sense?
It is a great thing that we have Business ethics in our MBA curriculum which helps our college in fulfilling its vision- “Developing ethically grounded managers which can contribute to society efficiently.”
That’s about it. But both B-schools and society at large need to be modest about what B-schools can achieve. To expect Bschools to produce a wonderfully balanced, caring and socially responsible person is sheer delusion. You can’t expect B-schools to succeed where Buddha, Jesus and Vivekananda failed.
Regards
Garvit D. Dave
