The next MBA requirement
Some time ago, business schools started making business ethics a required class. It goes by different names at different schools—perhaps, yours calls it Leadership and Responsibility, or Professional Responsibility, or Professional Ethics. Several schools instituted this requirement after the Enron and Worldcom scandals at the beginning of this decade. I’m not going to analyze the effectiveness of these additions, but I would like you, dear reader, to remember the current state of the economy and the MBAs who are partly responsible for getting it there. It’s a bit late for them to start applying the concepts they learned in that ethics class, don’t you think?
Given the results, I would like to suggest that schools replace the ethics requirement with something that might actually help MBAs: a writing requirement. In no academic environment have I ever met people who are worse writers than MBA students. And I’m not talking about the Russian finance wizard who just scored high enough on his TOEFL to get admitted. I’m talking about homegrown, American, English-speaking near-illiterates. How is possible to reach 27, 28, 29 and not know what makes a complete sentence? Or the difference between affect and effect? Or to think that bullet points somehow make an essay? You think that writing in bullet points displays your great skill at bottom-lining issues? No, it displays the fact that you don’t know how to write a single sentence in this language. And your use of the phrase “bottom-line” as a verb—well, you’re going to lose some points for that too. Where the hell did this whole he/she thing come from? Have you ever seen the Wall Street Journal publish a story that contained “he/she”? No, you haven’t. (Have you ever seen this/that in any reputable source? Have you ever seen it in the New York Post? Again, the answer is No.) The Journal is all you read, so I’m really not sure where you’re getting it from. If anyone knows the answer to this, please tell me. The gender wars and political correctness are over, people, and, anyway, we’ve more or less settled on “they” as an acceptable, genderless, single, personal pronoun if you must go that route. So, to you administrators who set curriculums, I give you the following in the format your students understand:
- Replace corporate ethics requirement with writing requirement
- Ethics classes have failed
- Writing classes produce clear and immediate results
- You like being able to show results
- If it’s good enough for the ethically high-minded medical schools, it should be good enough for you
