Empowering Ethics and Redefining Humanity

Exactly four weeks ago was the first time I stood in front of the MBA class. These first weeks have gone by so quickly, but at the same time it feels like we’ve done so much more than four weeks of learning together. Like the class, I have embarked on an exciting journey and there is no turning back.

Over the last three days we attended IMD’s inaugural Responsible Leadership Summit – three full days of discussion among business, government, and civic leaders about individual, corporate, and global responsibility. There was a lot of gloom and fear expressed, but overriding that was a real sense of opportunity. Humanity has a unique chance to redefine itself. When people look back a hundred years from now, what will they say about how we managed this transition? What can we do as individuals and together, to create a new way of deciding and acting for a better future?

The summit gave me a chance to think a lot about the MBA program. Many of the speakers called for more ethics and responsibility to be taught in MBA programs and throughout business education. “Business schools should have a course on ethics.” I found myself resisting this a bit. Not because I think ethics is unimportant – exactly the contrary. But my years of teaching executives at IMD (including our experienced MBAs) have led me to believe that business schools can make a bigger impact by doing something quite different.

Almost every manager I have met is highly conscious of ethical behavior, and wants to behave in an ethical and responsible way. We often have late-evening discussions about managing workers with AIDS, impending lay-offs, offering of bribes, child labor, and other difficult topics. In every one of these discussions, the managers involved have known exactly what the responsible choice is, and have thought in very comprehensive ways about the dilemmas. They are often pressured by systems and norms to behave in ways that compromise what they think is responsible, to work for short-term solutions rather than long-term ones. They feel this dilemma quite strongly, with intense frustration that there are no easy answers. They would like to feel strong enough to fight for win-win solutions.

I believe business schools should not teach ethics, we should empower ethics. The ethics are already there, they just get covered up in systems. We should give ethics courage, help it find its voice, refine it. This happens through discussions about the ethical aspect of decision-making, and most importantly in highly diverse classes where people can see surprisingly different sides to the same issue – and sometimes surprise themselves by all agreeing. We should help managers develop a repertoire of analytical and executional tools – yes, the traditional business ones like finance and accounting and economics and marketing and operations – so that when they face dilemmas of responsibility they can develop and implement the win-win solutions they already know are right. And we should help managers practice putting those tools into action in complex situations, through cases and through real-life interactions. Empowering ethics assumes that people understand their basic responsibilities, and the role of business schools is to help managers implement them.

I have had some nice opportunities the last few days to watch our MBAs in action. I smiled a lot. The MBAs are thoughtful and articulate, they ask tough questions of today’s corporate and thought leaders, and they discuss the answers amongst themselves and with the executives visiting for the summit. They pulled together a spontaneous group to visit with an important government leader, and had a fantastic dialogue together. It made me wonder – how can we make sure we build a program to empower and develop and refine and then let loose the power that is so obviously in them? That is how we will redefine humanity together.

So here is a question for you: Do you think that most managers are basically ethical, and would prefer to act in ethical ways? What can companies and business schools do to help empower ethics?