I worked at Bloomberg Financial News for a number of years. While there I encountered many of Wall Street’s shakers and movers. I found them, by-in-large, to be an extraordinarily arrogant lot.
They really did think they were the best and brightest. They really did think that $5 or $10 million a year in compensation was chump change, and people like themselves were entitled, entitled!, to much more as a best and brightest right. The fact that almost all were indeed getting much more proved in their minds that it was actually deserved.
They certainly did not believe they were predators ripping off the investing public with short term deals that benefited them more than anyone else, and they didn’t believe these deals would cause grievous economic harm to most everyone else down the road. After all, they were making these deals, and they were the best and brightest.
Today on NPR some representatives from leading business schools were discussing possible syllabus changes at their institutions. This new focus, if adopted, would give far greater emphasis to long term policies rather than short term ones, greater emphasis to serving client interests and not just the interests of CEOs and Wall Street heavies. One heard in these ideas echoes of the old Protestant ethic, a traditional talmudic ethic, and a heavy smattering of Pope Benedict’s new Encyclical Letter, “Caritas in Veritate” (Charity in Truth).
So will the proposed syllabus changes in B-schools work wonders in making the next generation of business leaders more socially responsible citizens? Well, they certainly won’t hurt. But by themselves they are unlikely to make that big a difference.
The first and most obvious reason is that the timing here is awful. Such changes should have been made in fat times. These days businesses, their customers, their investors, and their lenders are all focused on survival. Doing good in the marketplace is a hard sell in such an era. And then there’s the matter of ethics teaching generally. Lack of such teaching in B-Schools was not the real reason that business and Wall Street leaders have so often been been so utterly selfish. The real reason was simply that they were just too damn arrogant.
That’s where B-school syllabus reform has to focus if it is to make real changes in graduates. Students there must hear from day one that they are not the best and brightest. The best are cops and firemen. The brightest are teachers. B-schoolers are only people lucky enough to have the opportunity to serve a great many other people and earn a decent living doing so. They are privileged to have this opportunity.
I see truly reformed B-schools as a kind of Marine Corps. Students come in arrogant and it’s driven out of them. Once their exaggerated self-esteem has been excised, they are then reshaped into instruments to create a fairer, just-er economy where rewards are appropriately allocated. Merely adding ethics courses to a B-school’s syllabus is simply well-meant window dressing.