Now this is about the best idea I have heard of in a long while. Imagine a Treasury Secretary who actually understand what’s going on and AND has actually been right about the economy! Priceless. (And he does NOT have an MBA…)
Sign the petition at:
http://signon.org/sign/nominate-paul-krugman.fb23?source=s.fb&r_by=4571823
Author’s note: This was originally published on September 17th, but due to an active discussion and some edits is being re-posted today.
Happy birthday, Occupy Wall Street! Exactly one year ago, you took to the streets and changed the conversation in America about economic justice. Bless your little blue-tarp-covered heart.
But, a year on (what’s a mere year, anyway?), the business schools continue their wooden zombie-stagger onward, celebrating ancient corporate achievements and engorging the impressionable intellects and egos of smart men and women with enough false consciousness to screw the 99% for significant portions of their careers (until they burn out or are brought up short by the tawdry injustice of what they’re doing).
Here’s the kind of MBA school I’d like to see: coopBschool !
A business school for the 99%.
A business school aimed at meeting human needs in a just, sustainable manner, instead of meeting the needs of the few and the rich at the expense of everyone else (and, at best, greenwashing the mess).
A business school that’s about humanity, community, and quality of life, not about dehumanization, extraction, exploitation, and the commodification of life.
The medium is the message, my friends. You can’t truly change the message without changing the medium.
Smash the B-school paradigm!
OccupyMBA!
Here’s something rich and rhythmic to feed your sense of début de siècle irony and dread:
“Stopwatch Hearts” by Delerium on the Chimera album:
Lyrics:
Not that I’m that hard to Please
but lately when I hit the street
it’s hum-de-dum
(hum-de-dum-de dum)
When the hard times hit
they Hit the biz
The hardest hit make the best of it
Strong dollar stockbroker right to the bottom
Sink down with your boomtown
High water realtors arrive
With numbers over their eyes
Stopwatch hearts
Good God I love the party-starved
businessmen with stopwatch hearts
They don’t beat
(They tick)
They don’t beat
(they tick)
Good God I love the party-starved
businessmen with stopwatch hearts
They don’t beat
They don’t beat
‘Round that corner
Down the street
There’s a dive where working girls retreat
from their hum-de-dum
(hum-de-dum-de-dum)
So tilt that felt hat to the side
Thrift store 3 for .99
Gonna get me one
Gonna get me one
(and Get it every night)
Strong dollar stockbroker right to the bottom
Sink down with your boomtown
High water realtors arrive
With numbers over their eyes
Stopwatch hearts
Good God I love the party-starved
businessmen with stopwatch hearts
They don’t beat
(They tick)
They don’t beat
(they tick)
Good God I love the party-starved
businessmen with stopwatch hearts
They don’t beat
They don’t beat
Good God I love the party-starved
businessmen with stopwatch hearts
They don’t beat
(They tick)
They don’t beat
(they tick)
Good God I love the party-starved
businessmen with stopwatch hearts
They don’t beat
They don’t beat
(they tick)
So tilt that felt hat to the side
Thrift store 3 for .99
Gonna get me one
(and Get it every night)
Reading Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s latest political remonstration about Mitt Romney – “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital” – I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into that queasy, impotent apprehension we’ve all gotten to know so well since ‘W’ Bush ascended to the throne lo these dozen years ago.
The Dirty Dozen, you could call them.
There have certainly always been shitheads and tyrants and con-artists and despots around to make life uncertain and tawdry for the good folk, but by some odd juxtaposition of truth and cant (or perhaps it was growing up in an intensely hypocritical and/or naive household) I somehow made it well into adulthood believing that all senior leaders in positions of sweeping public responsibility (in America, at least) were committed to doing the right thing for democracy and the common good.
This sense that responsible adults were always there when you needed them pretty much died in my case when James Baker appeared on TV during those fateful days of uncertainty following the 2000 election. With the question of Florida’s votes tied up in the Supreme Court, and the Gore team making noises that the best thing to do would be to carry out a full recount or even re-vote in FL, Baker stared down the journalists, TV cameras, American people, and world and basically told us to go fuck off and yield to the assertive power and naked ambition of the Bush crew – democratic legitimacy be damned.
We’ve been living with that ever since.
Call it a coup d’état, because that’s what it was. I never understood why Gore didn’t fight the worthiest battle ever put before him in his career, before or since. Sure, off he went pleading for climate sanity, a good cause, right? But he stepped out of the ring when America’s democracy was threatened, and never made the difference he could have made. The Big Swinging Dicks (to use the term Michael Lewis immortalized) prevailed, in Washington as on Wall Street.
Taibbi didn’t convince me – I knew it already – but reading his latest article reminded me viscerally how so much of a BSD Mitt Romney is. The pandering, the manipulation, the falseness, the scaremongering are all part of the communication strategy aimed at pulling off (with thanks to Taibbi for the analogy) the greatest political leveraged buyout in modern history. He’d clean up, of course. America would be left in much deeper debt, monetary or otherwise.
What’s this have to do with MBAs?
A lot, actually. Leaving aside the fact that both ‘W’ and Mitt Romney are alumni of Harvard Business School, the strategies and tactics that both (and their machines) employ are right out of winner-take-all business strategy, and (their lying sanctimonious Christian-Right rhetoric notwithstanding) there’s not a shred of ethical integrity or public-mindedness to be found. This is all about beating the other takeover team and walking off with the spoils. The people who live here are just muppets, hobbits, the primordial ooze. They’ll get over it.
Hm. That reminds me of some other similar situation in America’s history, but I can’t quite place it…
I hope to dear God that Romney loses, as many polls currently indicate he might. Not that Obama’s administration entirely lacks the amoral killer-culture we see in Romney’s (shout-out to Hillary!). But, if Romney wins, I’ll be one of the first to argue that we’ve reached the point where America’s federal core needs to be disassembled so that the immense concentrated power that these sociopaths are drawn to is dissipated and a more direct, decentralized, accountable form of democracy begins to replace what we are presently confronted with.
Then the B-school boys can return to business and leave our critical, precious socio-political value chain alone.
A vain hope? Entirely beyond the scope of The Curriculum of the West?
OccupyMBA!
PS – What does the title of this post mean? Read this gripping excerpt from the final paragraphs of Matt Taibbi’s article (below). The bolding is mine. Perhaps this the the real meaning of globalization. The older notion of the absentee landlord or the absentee owner assumed that they lived at least somewhere. A truly evil lord lives nowhere.
Excerpt:
Listen to Mitt Romney speak, and see if you can notice what’s missing. This is a man who grew up in Michigan, went to college in California, walked door to door through the streets of southern France as a missionary and was a governor of Massachusetts, the home of perhaps the most instantly recognizable, heavily accented English this side of Edinburgh. Yet not a trace of any of these places is detectable in Romney’s diction. None of the people in any of those places bled in and left a mark on the man.
Romney is a man from nowhere. …
Romney, … is a perfect representative of one side of the ominous cultural divide that will define the next generation, not just here in America but all over the world. Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.
That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.
Mitt Romney isn’t blue or red. He’s an archipelago man. That’s a big reason that voters have been slow to warm up to him. From LBJ to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, Americans like their politicians to sound like they’re from somewhere, to be human symbols of our love affair with small towns, the girl next door, the little pink houses of Mellencamp myth. Most of those mythical American towns grew up around factories – think chocolate bars from Hershey, baseball bats from Louisville, cereals from Battle Creek. Deep down, what scares voters in both parties the most is the thought that these unique and vital places are vanishing or eroding – overrun by immigrants or the forces of globalism or both, with giant Walmarts descending like spaceships to replace the corner grocer, the family barber and the local hardware store, and 1,000 cable channels replacing the school dance and the gossip at the local diner.
Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.
I just heard Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz interviewed on NPR, and noted a fascinating fact: in his estimation, only a tiny share of the so-called “1%” are entrepreneurs. He said that the large majority of 1-percenters are people who have inherited wealth, investors, and other sorts of finance jocks (i-bankers, hedge fund managers, traders, venture capitalists, etc.).
What does that say about where America’s incentives lie, in this land where 400 people own more than the poorest 150 million?
Do the the rewards accrue to the inventors, the innovators, the skunk-workers? To the people who have truly improved our lives? Or does money simply make money?
When the revolutionaries raise capital gains taxes and carried interest taxes to the earned income tax rate, perhaps they can also figure out a way to eliminate taxation completely from truly value-creating entrepreneurship in technology and other vital areas…
Green Mountain Socialist senator Bernie Sanders puts it very plainly in a recent CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer: any talk of “free enterprise” or “the market economy” when it comes to the largest Wall Street banks and many other large corporations/industries is empty rhetoric. In this realm of political-commercial oligarchy, decisions about leadership, investment, products and services, organizational development, etc. are not made under the logic of market competition but instead through complex relational jockeying among top executives and investors aimed at expanding and perpetuating their oligarchy, especially via their influence over politicians, regulatory agencies, and the courts.
They have captured their regulators (in institutional economic terms) and, in the interests of both American democracy and our long-term economic prosperity as a people, need to be busted up and re-regulated.
Thank you, Bernie, for your clear articulation of this. (Goes to show what remaining independent does for one’s ability to speak honestly and frankly about the affairs of the nation.)
There’s nothing especially noteworthy about this situation – China runs this way, Russia runs this way, the Vatican runs this way, Machiavelli lived and breathed this logic, and so did the senate and consuls in ancient Rome – but America remains committed (last time I checked) to popular, representative democracy as the way to secure the general Welfare and the Blessings of Liberty (preamble to the US Constitution). As long as this commitment stands, circumstances such as those of the present simply cannot be allowed. Look at what happens.
Next week, Sanders will be introducing legislation to force a breakup of the six largest banks in the US.
By the way, if the concentration of influence, capture of government, and failure of both markets and democracy is a problem in the financial sector, what about other industries? On Tuesday, in his coolly received lunchtime keynote at the VBSR conference in Burlington, Vermont, Seventh Generation CEO John Replogle marveled at the fact that Wal-Mart’s economy was now as large as the GDPs of the poorest 161 nations combined. Um, concentrated much? Where is that going to lead…?
MBA students of the world, ask yourselves: is it your lot to do the bidding of the few, the influential, and the democratically unaccountable – and hope a few crumbs fall from their table that put you slightly ahead of every other laboring schmuck in the disintegrating middle class – or should you be able to freely take risks and throw your energy, creativity, and skills into the ring with others like you and create the good society and the sustainable prosperity that you and your community deserve? Think about that question. Get involved. Study political economy. Because Sanders is quite accurate in both his diagnosis and his proposed treatment, and whether he succeeds or not, you need to understand why, for the sake of your own humanity.
I’m sitting in Boston right now at the CERES conference listening to Jeremy Rifkin speak about his new book, The Third Industrial Revolution. Extremely compelling. Read it.
The 2nd Industrial Paradigm: top-down, centralized, proprietary, closed, private, elite. Fueled by hazardous, large-scale energy technologies (oil, coal, gas, uranium). A very short and dangerous civilization!
The 3rd Industrial Paradigm: lateral, distributed, open, collaborative, shared, accessible. Energy+Communication+Economy. Post-carbon. Unstoppable.
You know the difference when you see it, don’t you?
This applies to MBA education as much as anything else.
OccupyMBA!
Manager’s Samizdat:
“Of course, the merchant has a role to play in society, but glorification of merchant activities tends to draw people away from a recognition of the true source of life.”
- Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution (1978)
Been musing on the notion of “the Curriculum of the West” of late (see kulturCritic) – more on this later. Fukuoka’s book, quoted above, should clearly be part of the “Management Curriculum of the West.”
[This isn’t going to make much sense to folks who haven’t done an MBA or studied organizational behavior/organizational theory in, say, a sociology PhD, but here goes.]
Background: I’m visiting Bainbridge Graduate Institute, the Original American Sustainability-oriented MBA Program, and observed a class today in “Organizational Systems.” Then it hit me: conventional organizational analysis has a deep flaw and it has to do with a concealed individualistic assumption in the “new thinking” that is supposedly radical, yet presents an obstacle to more enlightened, sustainable modes of management.
This flaw was introduced in the late 1970s and early 1980s when critical thinkers and post-modernists started to make their liberating methods known in management circles. Their central point was that organizations are not fully knowable physical objects you can tamper with and manipulate, but intangible complexities that can be looked at from many equally valid standpoints. Out of this came Gareth Morgan’s eight metaphors (Images of Organization) and, later, Lee Bolman’s and Terrence Deal’s four organizational frames. The latter’s work, Reframing the Organization, is probably the world’s most commonly used textbook for organizational behavior courses in undergrad and MBA programs, and has been ascendant for at least a decade.
To be sure, the approach these books introduced was a big improvement over what came before: brutally boring, mechanistic neo-Taylorism that trudged through organizational management looking for the “right answer” to help “fix things” as if every organization were nothing more than a box-filled diagram with order-following people in “functions”.
So now we were enlightened! Of course, it has taken a long time for even this insight to percolate through the flaccid axons of conventional thinkers – many businesspersons would still consider this old stuff “revolutionary” and “far out leftist woo woo” – but it’s the norm now. Get used to it.
Wait! DON’T get used to it! It is flawed! It’s transitional thinking from the last century – a positive step, but very much NOT where we want to relax and stop our forward march toward Understanding.
Think about it.
Each frame is a perspective that we construct, and then we forget we constructed it. If we don’t watch it, the frame becomes the reality. “The culture is re-asserting itself!” “Oh, you know, office politics…” “I can’t get anything done in this oppressive structure!”
The map starts looking like the territory.
But that’s not the worst of it.
The worst is that each of Bolman’s & Deal’s frames is based in an individualistic, ego-centric apprehension of reality. This is the curse of reductionism compounded by the curse of ego-centrism.
Consider: We REIFY (construct into false concreteness) one of a number of perspectives, FORGET that we have, and are then limited (rationally and emotionally) by the fact that each of these perspectives is deeply planted in concepts that relate to our own personal, individual context: my needs, my interests, my power, the rules I follow, my values and beliefs, the stories I tell, the meaning I assign, my victories, my defeats…
Look in Bolman & Deal: where is the sustainability piece? There isn’t one. They were too early. Their logic admits no entry for sustainability.
I assert that sustainable organizational leadership by definition transcends the individual, and anchors reality in the “we,” the collective, the community. You won’t find an easily navigated road from B&D’s frames to the modes where truly sustainable organizations appear to operate – the servant leaders, authentic community, the gift economy, employee ownership and workplace democracy, coops, and traditional tribal organizations. Practitioners of these have leapt beyond the ego-centric frames, into a wholly different radical place of analysis and action.
The book has not yet been written that brings sustainability into organizational analysis in a fashion that’s as powerful and complete as B&D’s approach. Theirs is a book for LAST century. There’s no sustainability in it. It’s a transitional form. How do we keep what’s valuable about framing without remaining trapped in its forgetful reductionism and heedless egocentrism?
Leastwise, that’s what blogger Sandy Krolick leveled at OccupyMBA.com in this recent fit of kulturcriticism, here.
No way I’m standing for this flak! Here’s my first response:
Sandy, thanks for honoring http://OccupyMBA.com with your challenging (and well-trafficked) post. I asked for it, and I got it. I’m going to have to write a longer article to respond to everything, but this is a start…
So, ok, ok, yes, basically you’re saying that the businessperson who harbors any aspirations, imagines anything new, convinces and guides any other human being, wields any power, is stirred by any ego, seeks any private reward from achievements accomplished with the help of others, etc. – all typical of an entrepreneur – is a “psychopath,” PNG around the Pleistocene campfire, where only the “non-binding guidance of tribal elders and the quiet pleadings of the earth” hold sway. That’s pretty harsh. It’s also a completely illogical and useless argument to pursue in the context of present-day management education. We know that, today, the corporate form of organization and the skills of professional managers are utilized by the rich and unscrupulous to defile the planet and abuse people and communities in the pursuit of wealth and power. This has been endlessly refined and elaborated in the past century, especially, and the MBA degree is one manifestation. But to call all entrepreneurs – social or otherwise – “psychopaths” is to throw out the baby with the bathwater, in my opinion.
A psychopath is someone who is mentally ill, exhibiting abnormal, dangerous, violent behavior.
What entrepreneurs do in modern society is quite “normal”. Few people consider their behavior insane. With allowances for your flight of pseudo-nostalgia for some ancient “fully embodied” time when our ancestors lived in “small and relatively egalitarian pre-civilized bands,” we can imagine that the behavior of a (transported) Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Henry Ford would have been viewed as quite ill and threatening by people bound by strict collectivist taboos, and by an entire species that experienced even the slightest technological changes (such as new ways to chip arrowheads) over tens and scores of generations. Sure, viewed through their eyes, everything we’re up to is crazy. And, indeed, it probably is. But it’s the society that’s crazy, not the entrepreneurs. They aren’t psychopaths. They are well-adjusted, and most of the successful ones (in business, not all the other walks of power you rope in) provide people with things they consider useful.
It’s here we need to begin, not back in some imagined hunter-gatherer camp. There is so much going on in modern business that is obviously unethical and illegal – hurting people, damaging health, manipulating politics, polluting, destroying habitat, depleting resources. This is the low-hanging fruit. As only a modest step toward addressing this, management education and practice can seek to honor human dignity, build inclusive and respectful communities, see the Earth in ecological systems terms, give new importance to the local and the human-scale, and embody many things that are definitely alien to Wall Street and mainstream large corporate cultures, but present in activity we can still recognize as business. Good management skills are just as necessary on farms, in farmer’s markets, in co-operative organizations, in small-scale manufacturing, and in public enterprises delivering education, health care, and other services, as they are in the industries commanded by the ruthless and the greedy. You can say, All is lost, look to the Pleistocene, all reform is futile, but I’m not ready to do that, and neither are many others. Reveling ironically as the shit hits the fan seems irresponsible to me. Even the most disgusted cynic will have to be a little thankful to those whose energy and resourcefulness provide them with life’s necessities if and when times are trying.
Finally, sure, OccupyMBA may shed favorable light on our MBA program in the eyes of some – and by the way, Sandy, it’s definitely NOT a for-profit graduate school, I MUST emphasize – but this blog is my own, and I am doing it because I am thoroughly sick of what the wealthy and the powerful and the corporate and the conservative are doing to roundly f*ck up this beautiful world we find ourselves living in, and lending momentum to a radical debate about how managers are educated, trained, and indoctrinated is a small way I can contribute to changing the pattern, even if it comes into its own too late to significantly redirect the present juggernaut.
Your servant,
Lost Arrow
[Original 1/31/2012 Post]
I’ve been thinking a lot about corporate personhood lately – all the controversy surrounding Citizens United v. FEC, which protects unlimited, undisclosed corporate political donations as “free speech”. We built up a good wiki page about this in the New Economic Charter last fall. In that page, constitutional amendments proposed by US Rep. Jim McGovern, US Rep. Ted Deutch, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would reverse Citizens United v. FEC are described. This, of course, is an idea that radio personality Thom Hartmann has been pushing for several years: a constitutional amendment that curtails the construct of corporate personhood and the ability of said legal persons to manipulate our political system for their own purposes.
In the current Congress, those amendments appear to have zero chances of passage. Will they ever? The sluices carrying corporate and wealthy individuals’ money into politics are so wide open now that the legendary Morganza Spillway (remember that? how soon we forget!) is a mere tinkle beside that torrent.
Consistent with this, our society’s autophagy continues unabated… Barack Obama trumpets ever more desperate and expensive efforts to wring fossil fuels from the land. The health-extraction industry keeps growing at a rate many multiples of the CPI. Entergy Nuclear Corp. continues its court-supported stare-down of the entire political and civic establishment of the State of Vermont.
Here’s a crazy thought. Let’s assume there won’t be any constitutional or judicial relief for decades – generations, even – until the excess of dysfunction over whatever good corporations can achieve is so overshot that Americans rise up as one nation and actually vote in their own interests, beating corporate personhood back to something resembling the mid-20th century corp., or the German soziale Marktwirtschaft. Admittedly, this is a lunatic’s raving.
What to do in the meantime?
Idea: turn the situation on its head. By this, I mean, act as if every corporate employee, from the CEO down to the shipping room clerk, is personally and unboundedly responsible for everything the corporation does. Make it personal. Confront them. Refuse to deal with them. Insult them. Ostracize them. Spill things on their sleeves. Conduct a citizen’s arrest. Tell them they can’t hide behind that big old giant Corporate Person anymore. We don’t buy it. Sure, sure… ”Good people working for bad companies.” Right. Like, “what’s a nice girl like you doing, working for a nasty company like that?” Tell them that if they’re going to get to pass the responsibility up to a giant mega-construct that abstracts away human morality, accountability, citizenship, and civic duty – yet enjoys Bill of Rights protections – then tell them, nope, we’re going to start at the other end of the pipe now. You are your corporation. It’s fractal: the whole corporation and all its deeds and misdeeds reproduced in every little human atom of its structure.
Yikes!
That’ll cause a stir.
And illustrate the complete absurdity of the situation we have created in the Virtual Forbidden City that our klepto-capitalist society has become.
Time to Get Personal!
OccupyMBA!
==============
February 28, 2012 “Get Personal!” Update
Wow. This is actually being put into practice. Check out the campaign that Rebuild the Dream is launching against Freddie Mac:
From: Natalie Foster, Rebuild the Dream <info@rebuildthedream.com>
Subject: Let’s pop Freddie Mac’s bubble
Date: February 28, 2012 11:34:44 AM EST
To: …
Reply-To: info@rebuildthedream.com
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Manager’s Samizdat
“Labor flexibility” is a good thing, no? You hire when your markets are on fire, and lay off when it pays off. This is an age-old right of employers, especially in the US. Of course, unions tried to temper it, but less than 9% of private-sector labor today is unionized – below 1932 levels – so union rules don’t govern layoffs in the vast majority of cases.
Firing someone for incompetence or unethical behavior is one thing – there’s community support for this. Dumping people abruptly as a way to manage shorter-term costs may make sense in a narrow quarterly earnings terms, but is profoundly troubling, a kind of violence against their humanity, or at least, their dignity.
I did it myself once, and have been bothered by it ever since. I had a firm in Sweden, with three employees, and I let them all go when a major business downturn (the 2001 IT crash/dot.com recession), combined with my desire to move back to the US, left no prospects for continued operation of my firm. I was the sole proprietor, and the only person generating new business. For the final 3-4 months of my employees’ tenure, I was working overtime to pay their salaries, but could not bill them out. We parted tensely. One never spoke to me again. There must be a special case for small businesses like this. The emotions are raw. The ethics are problematic. The economics are compelling. The effects on a community and on families are limited in every such case – many small boats – and this may be about as close to the clement version of “creative destruction” as one can get (more Schumpeter’s than Marx’s).
In bigger organizations, layoffs are more systematic and pernicious. What if someone has dedicated many years of hard, productive work to a company, building the economy of a household and a professional identity around it, and is then suddenly told, without warning, “you have twenty minutes to clear your desk, and you will then be escorted by security down to the lobby?”
For a masterful portrayal of this, check out the first few minutes of the movie Margin Call (2011). The irony of Eric Dale’s layoff emerges around the fact that he’s apparently being let go in a precautionary move as the 2008 economy weakens, yet by himself has figured out that his investment bank is about to fall into a vastly deeper and more dangerous hole, depicting indeed the trap that Lehman Brothers fell into. (Dale is subsequently enticed and then blackmailed back in because of what he knows. ) Dale’s grim shock and phlegmatic compliance as he’s ushered out of the building are mesmerizing. It’s hard to feel sorry for him – his salary was and probably eventually again will be way more than what the average American earns – but the power of the large organization over the individual is awesome to behold.
Where the effects may be a lot more substantial – more devastating for individuals, families, and communities – are the cases of large employers, including manufacturers, that lay off employees en masse. Economists explain that this is ultimately good for the economy, freeing up workers from unprofitable companies so they become available for new, more productive uses. Laws like those in the EU that make it difficult and expensive to lay off workers are castigated as making Europe’s economy “sclerotic” and uncompetitive, chasing investment away to low-wage countries with weaker protection of employee rights (such as the US; check out IKEA’s labor conflict at Swedwood in Danville, Virginia).
I don’t actually believe that. The EU is diverse, running the gamut from Greece to Germany, but I think a lot of production stays in the EU because of factors like a qualified workforce, national health care systems, proximity to markets, better control over production systems and supply chains, and government incentives. However, economies do need to continually undergo renewal through ongoing reallocation of people, capital, knowledge, and more, and regulations that lock things up too tightly can be damaging to the producers.
An entirely different view of this recently came from Paul Millman, CEO of Chroma Technology, Inc., a high-tech optical filters manufacturer here in Vermont with over $20 million in sales, roughly 100 employees, and representation in Germany and China. Since its founding two decades ago, Chroma has been employee-owned and worker-managed. There’s no outside equity. It’s a C corporation, and not an ESOP. Employee turnover is extremely low. Very few people have ever been involuntarily fired, and economic layoffs have never taken place. Decisions involve in-depth democratic process.
Millman explained that, prior to Chroma’s founding, he had been fired more times than anyone he knew, often with no satisfactory explanation, and that, in Chroma, he has wanted to make it very difficult for people to be fired or laid off. It’s simply inhumane. Plus, the limited research into the competitiveness and longevity of genuinely employee-owned companies seems to indicate that they weather downturns well by voluntarily reducing bonuses, salaries, and other expenses, and bounce back when their markets improve, innovating along the way, with their organizations and internal relationships intact. (Like a strong family!) There’s ideology at work here, not government restrictions: a commitment to employee ownership and empowerment, and a belief in the sanctity of human rights and dignity.
In an economy under the onslaught of low-wage global competition, growing resource scarcity, climate change, and other disruptive, unpredictable forces, employee ownership sounds like a much better way to meet needs and preserve our industrial base than, on one hand, the corporations that hire and lay people off as if they were slack that management can calculatingly take up or let off, or, on the other, government restrictions imposed with little understanding of individual companies’ needs.
Check out:
http://www.aashe.org/blog/aashes-higher-education-occupation-project
One of our friends got a mention…
Amazing stories. Was it all a dream?
OccupyMBA!
According to the Graduate Management Admission Council, writes Chad Brooks in Business News Daily, nearly three-quarters of businesses plan to hire MBAs in 2012, up from 58 percent in 2011. This is surely a welcome turn of trend for the legions of would-be salary(wo)men out there longing for a shot at a Global 1000 cubicle. It has been an employer’s market for too, too long. If you believe GMAC (which certainly wants you to because they make their clams by selling the GMAT exam for $250 each, the volume of which further declined 3% in 2011 from its 2009 peak), then times are ahead when employers will again actually be competing with one another for attractive MBA hires. In this scenario, the level of competition will be even higher due to the dip in MBA enrollments over the past three years (as much as 15% in the USA), creating a temporary shortage of this sought-after commodity, er, human being.
Keen job-seekers in Davos, Switzerland aren’t taking any chances, however. Not content to relax by the XBox waiting for those recruitment letters to arrive, they are camping out in igloos, probably armed with stacks of CVs, to be first in the queue when global executives emerge from optimistic World Economic Forum sessions on the lookout for new talent.
Oh, wait! Sorry. Those are Occupy WEF protesters who have traded their tarps and tents for the white stuff. Mic check, anyone?
But just in case they have a change of heart, out there in the cold and wet while the corporate elite recreate indoors, here’s a great tool for tackling a still-recalcitrant job market with some high-powered corpspeak. This will totally impress: the Random Financial Advice Generator. Just click the button and walk away with the kind of beta people (in Davos, anyway) pine for.
Here’s one of my favorites: ”Arbitrage-free capital structures: in unsecured sectors, plan to securitize them.”
Or how about “The smart investor this season will be sure not to amortize liquid REMICs.”
Brilliant.
OccupyMBA!
Manager’s Samizdat
Al Lewis has produced a delightfully wicked roll-call of crooked corporate captains, following from the hapless case of Capitano Francesco Schettino, the Italian who actually managed to “roll” the $450 million cruise shop Costa Concordia. (I thought that only happened to SUVs on icy Vermont roads, not ocean liners! Bravissimo, Capitano!)
In case its life at WSJ.COM is too brief – I mean, I thought Rupert Murdoch was buddies with these guys – the article is reproduced below in its entirety, properly attributed, for posterity. I hope none of them had MBAs. What? Most of them? Hilarious!
AL’S EMPORIUM, JANUARY 22, 2012, By AL LEWIS
The world’s been too hard on Capt. Francesco Schettino, calling him “Captain Coward” and “Chicken of the Sea” when he has performed as well as many others at the helm.
Yes, he ran aground a $450 million cruise liner, lost lives, abandoned ship and turned Carnival Cruise Lines into a circus. It was an accident.
Plenty of other captains have boldly steered into perilous waters, failed to see rocks and crashed. They’ve also lost footing on shifting surfaces, only to land in lifeboats, leaving others to drown. This has been a regular headline for decades.
Capt. Jeffrey Skilling abandoned ship to spend more time with his family, months before Enron hit bottom. He said it was an accident, too.
Capt. Bernie Ebbers said he didn’t have any idea how phony accounting entries got into his ship’s log. As captain of WorldCom, he couldn’t be bothered with minor details like accounting.
Capt. Dennis Kozlowski liked Italian islands as much as Capt. Schettino. He threw a $2 million birthday party for his wife on Sardinia, using money he looted from his shareholders at Tyco International.
Capt. Richard Fuld steered Lehman Brothers into a swampy lagoon of subprime debt. He, too, hit an uncharted rock. Or, at least, it wasn’t on his chart.
Capt. Jimmy Cayne was reportedly smoking weed and playing cards as Bear Stearns sank.
Capt. John Thain took care of his crew at Merrill Lynch, pushing through $3.62 billion in executive bonuses as his firm washed up on the Bank of America.
Capt. Angelo Mozilo wouldn’t go down with his ship. He unloaded more than $200 million in stock options before Countrywide Financial capsized, and he left the wreckage to shareholders.
Capt. Bernie Madoff sure had a funny way of financing his yachts. He even named one of them “Bull.” People somehow thought this was a reference to bull…markets.
Capt. Allen Stanford, the world’s second-greatest alleged Ponzi schemer behind Mr. Madoff, is slated for trial this week. He took over the island nation of Antigua with his offshore banking empire, Stanford Financial. Some even call him the “Pirate of the Caribbean.”
Capt. Tony Hayward went to a yacht race as BP’s rig was spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. He expressed the same thought other disgraced captains must have: “I want my life back.”
Capt. Daniel Mudd of Fannie Mae and Capt. Richard Syron of Freddie Mac overloaded their cargo hulls with junk mortgage securities. They didn’t need to hit a rock. They sank themselves.
Capt. Jon Corzine sank MF Global so deep they can’t seem to find all of his ship. Not even the Bermuda Triangle can make $1.2 billion in customer funds mysteriously vanish.
Capt. Ben Bernanke has launched QE1 and QE2 and he may soon christen QE3 in the Federal Reserve’s fleet. He wants these bond-buying programs to bail out every foundering captain on the sea.
Unlike many other captains, Capt. Schettino wasn’t risking it all in a self-dealing bid to get stinking rich. He probably wasn’t drunk like the captain of the Exxon Valdez. He was just trying to show people a good time by skimming by a beautiful island.
He then did what every other captain does in an unimaginable crisis. He learned he wasn’t as fearless as he’d pretended to be. He panicked. He slipped. He somehow landed in a lifeboat. He probably wishes he hadn’t. But it’s not like he jumped with a golden parachute.
Al Lewis is a columnist for Dow Jones Newswires in Denver. He blogs at tellittoal.com; his email address is al.lewis@dowjones.com
Bill Schubart notes:
The paranoid language trumped up by those who dislike government assumes that most Americans are much less intelligent than, in fact, we are. We learn by education, example and experience. An MBA and accumulated or inherited wealth are not the only determinants of wisdom.
While I am generally inclined to agree with Bill Schubart on most matters, isn’t an MBA a form of education? Hello….? [... crickets ...] Where did everybody go?
OccupyMBA!
Occupy the business schools? Really? Because this is what David Ikenberry and Donna Socknell declared last week in Bloomberg/Business Week. Does this mean doing away with the hierarchies – the academic ranks, the departments, tenure – and replacing them with the horizontal organization of Occupy? Does this mean opening up decisions to all stakeholders’ voices, with transparency, joy, and love? Occupy is a militant protest movement to its most ardent participants, not a marketing slogan, corporate change program, or lifestyle brand. Occupy means radical reexamination of every institution with a hand in the overconcentration of wealth and power, the plutocratization of politics, the marginalization of communities and cultures, and the plunder of the Earth.
Invoking “Occupy” is a radical step for any B-school dean. What further steps await the intrepid dean-gone-occupier? Slashing tuition from above $60,000 to more reasonable levels? Forswearing the facilitation of private student loans? Surely, including ethics lessons in every course – as if every moment weren’t teachable – falls far short of a moral education. Who cares about deontological this and consequentialist that and how-would-you-resolve-this-dilemma if the MBA students are not surrounded by a caring, collaborative, supportive and authentic community throughout their studies, where ethical leadership is modeled continually, and where domination and hypocrisy are leavened and reversed? It takes a deeply moral community to build a courageously ethical leader.
What about the numbing reductionism of the modern MBA paradigm? Occupy seeks to make whole a broken society and political economy. In conventional MBA programs, the departments are proudly disparate siloes, decoupling academics from one another’s worlds. They read different journals, go to different conferences, write mutually unintelligible (yet similarly irrelevant) papers, and teach different theories and world-views. What good is an overlay of ethics modules if the “functional” disciplines are deeply fractured and reductionism rules?
In 1960, about 5,000 new MBA students enrolled in American business schools. In 2009 – the all-time peak – this number reached around 125,000. The half-century spanned by these two years saw our middle class decline, our manufacturing flee, our family farms decimated, our small towns gutted, our people ravaged by excess and pointlessness, and the financial sector swell into a dominant component of our economy. It also saw the explosive spread of a global capitalism that grows more extractive and heedless by the day, particularly in places where environmental protection and human rights are weak. Is there any connection between the mindset of the modern MBA grad and these destructive decades? One has to wonder, because they were running the organizations that made all this happen. Ikenberry and Socknell call them “good people doing terrible things.” How were they good? Good is what good does [that’s what business ethics profs call “consequentialism,” by the way]. Society lets the likes of Enron, Bernie Madoff, Jack Abramoff, and MF Global do what they do because of a corrupted, hard-hearted, individualistic culture of economic power cutting across business, government, education, and other major institutions. Yeah, maybe occupying the B-schools would help.
Finally, are cross-curricular CSR modules even remotely adequate? Modern management has taught us to think of people as consumers, to ignore communities, to buy off “stakeholders,” to abandon economic losers, to discount the future, to place exaggerated value on personal wealth, and to treat much of what makes our planet and our humanity wonderful as disposable commodities. CSR doesn’t really challenge these. CSR is often about band-aids and public communication that, at best, mean a little less unsustainability. This is the most that even the “good” companies usually want in their new hires – not real occupiers!
John Ehrenfeld sees sustainability as “the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on Earth forever.” Can business schools steeped in the converse be trusted to truly “occupy” themselves in this spirit?
The temptation to abandon one’s faith in “sustainable leadership” is always niggling, and can become overwhelming. It’s a notion that only broaches when the collapse and disappearance of leadership – the role and impact of a leader – becomes a real possibility in an organization, project, or movement. Otherwise, why worry about sustaining? We usually don’t in routine organizational settings, with their established cultures and standard operating procedure and predictable career paths. It’s when things are closer to the edge that this becomes of real concern: organizations in conflict, growth, mergers, bankruptcies, leadership transitions, social change movements, political campaigns, and so on.
“We’re not a leaderless movement,” enthused one of the participants in an Occupy Coordination conference call in November, “we’re a leaderful movement!” This attractive idea seems consistent with what some have observed in the OWS communities: collaboration, inclusiveness, emotional maturity, a warm spirit of welcome and camaraderie. Is this evidence of “sustainable leadership” in OWS?
The opposite has also been in evidence. At a working group meeting at 60 Wall Street in late October, before the occupation was busted up, and when the lobby swarmed with such meetings all day and every evening, it was clear that sustainable leadership skills were in short supply.
A guy had a proposal for the group that involved adopting a vision he had articulated, and then following his process to develop a strategy and action plan. This person, who appeared to have been a regular participant in the WG’s meetings, had brought some hard copy for the group, and it had apparently been available online for a day or two. Despite the best of intentions, the group’s process lurched from one dysfunction to another. There was confusion about whether the group was obligated to examine and decide the proposal or not. There was confusion about the meeting’s purpose. There were several false starts in terms of who would facilitate. For over half an hour, the group debated its own process, with impatience rising and tempers starting to flare. (It was evening, and a number of participants would be leaving early to attend the 7 PM General Assembly at Zuccotti Park.)
With a tone that gradually shifted from assertive to irritated, the guy pushed his agenda. He was offended by the fact that a previous meeting had allegedly reached consensus about an earlier version of his proposal, agreeing to put it on today’s agenda, and that all prior momentum seemed to have now stalled. I had not been at the last meeting, but his frustration appeared genuine. He had clearly put some work into the proposal.
Finally, as the meeting wandered off into a muddle about how the stack was supposed to work, the guy stood up and threatened to walk out. This got everyone’s attention. Within minutes, he would be gone, but what he did fascinated me, and has remained on my mind as an example of the mismatch between MBA-style managerialism and the OWS movement’s leadership needs.
Holding up his proposal, he assured us that he had an MBA and had done lots of this sort of vision/strategy work for corporate clients before. He also was a CPA. If the working group did not adopt his vision and proposal, he was “outta here,” and knew there were many other clients who would value his contributions instead. This was it. Take it or leave it.
The meeting, which consisted of about a dozen people, was in no position to respond. It was a Luhmann-ian does-not-compute situation. He was offering a challenge in an individualistic, I-am-empowered-to-negotiate fashion to an organizational entity that only understood the logic of collaboration, commitment, and inclusion. The meeting could not respond as a single-minded superorganism, nor could it respond through a person empowered to represent it (i.e., a spokesperson or chair), and neither the facilitator nor the stack-taker could speak for the meeting.
Through the guy and the meeting, two profoundly different paradigms of society clashed for a few minutes more – individualistic, expertise-based managerialism vs. collaborative community – and then he disappeared into the cool autumn night, pissed off and outta there. The facilitator admitted he felt that the guy’s walk-out was a “failure,” and there was a brief sense of regret. The meeting then muddled on to other matters, more harmonious now, and actually got a few things done before most folks ran off to the incipient GA.
What was accomplished, and what price was paid? Did OWS lose an expert because of its organizational inefficiency and chaos, its obsession with process over effectiveness? Does this pattern portend the ultimate failure of OWS as a movement because its collective hostility to managerialism, expertise, and discipline continually prevents effective action, burns people out, and chases away the competence it needs? As someone who saw a nascent US green movement in the 1980s remain nascent partly because of its organizational gridlock (e.g., the endless, inconclusive pursuit of consensus), I take this fear seriously.
Listen, for example, to a recent post by Sandy Krolick about his experience at a similar meeting two months later:
[M]y visit to the Big Apple indicates that the OWS movement is now officially on life-support. At my brother’s urging, we wandered into an organizational meeting of New York’s OWS crowd in the Atrium Building at 60 Wall Street, which, post-9/11, now houses more than 4,500 employees of Deutsche Bank, New York. There were approximately twelve generally disheveled and incoherent OWS comrades in attendance, and screaming over one another. The big issue of the evening appeared to be the question of who was going to be eligible to receive free subway metro-passes, an issue that never seemed to be resolved. Yet, several folks were pushing a side agenda aimed at ejecting one of their “members” for failure to cooperate. Can you imagine that… non-cooperation, in America? We can’t even get protest right; we must organize into general assemblies (a subordinating move itself), because we do not naturally understand cooperation. I could sense that this was not Tahrir Square in Egypt.
OK. I did not witness anything that trivial. Perhaps the caravan has indeed moved on, leaving few organizers or thinkers remaining in the cold, echoing spaces of 60 Wall Street. But, even in the heyday of OWS circa October 2011, many visitors to the atrium would have been forgiven for making similar observations.
I don’t believe that the greater “purpose” of OWS is to replace “management.” The guy should have stifled his Mr. MBA/CPA ego, realized that there would be other places and other times to contribute his expertise productively, and stayed at the meeting. Given his supposed expertise, he should have calmly participated, looking for real opportunities to apply meaningful leverage, and not reacting to false ones. What was really at stake: the progress of the OWS movement or his professional bravado/ego? He was offered a supreme opportunity to exercise sustainable leadership – leadership in expertise that he could sustain, as well as the working group – and it seems he passed it up. How often is this repeated? Is America so individualistic that almost all of its crop of potential sustainable leaders is destined to wither on the vine whenever they confront the logic of collaboration and mutual solidarity? (Or morph into warp-speed individualism-managerialism when offered non-collaborative opportunities to perform à la ENRON or Goldman-Sachs?) Is truly collaborative, sustainable leadership emerging nonetheless on the activist fringes of society, in the occupations and campuses and informal organizing where social change is relentlessly pursued?
Manager’s Samizdat
Here’s an interesting paste from an article in today’s Los Angeles Times by Kim Murphy, about the ongoing port occupations:
… In Portland, meanwhile, where an Occupy demonstration shut down two major loading terminals Monday morning, demonstrators regrouped by late afternoon and headed toward another terminal.
“Now we are headed to Terminal 4, which is about a three-mile walk, and we’re going to shut it down,” said James Douglas Gless, president of a land development and environmental engineering consulting firm in Oregon City, who joined the protests.
Gless said he decided to participate because of growing frustration with the political process.
“I’m a 56-year-old corporate president. The last three years were good to me. But I’ve got two kids that have got to grow up in a country that has been stolen by these huge national and multinational corporations,” he told the Times. “What else can we do? We want our votes again.”
Amen, brother. I’m a 51-year-old academic administrator with three kids, a mortgage, and all the other bric-a-brac of a crumbling educated middle-class existence, and I couldn’t agree more. I bet he’s got an MBA. What? Shut up, vote, work hard, pay your taxes and everything will be OK? Yeah, right.
All the same, all that said, we can’t give up on democracy, either. Look at what Rep. Deutsch and (my) Sen. Bernie Sanders are doing to advance a proposed constitutional amendment to overturn unlimited corporate personhood. This deserves our support as well. To para-quote Ronald Reagan, “Legislate, but occupy!”
For more information:
With Christmas approaching, this seemed worth reminding us of.
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
- Lament of the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s deceased business partner, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843)
Here’s the scene from a 1984 film version of A Christmas Carol; this dialog starts around minute 7: Scene from A Christmas Carol
Thanks to Gary Flomenhoft at Vermont Commons for the link to this article, “Koch Political Group Brags About Bullying GOP Lawmakers Into Denying Climate Science.”
Here, Koch Brothers-financed Americans for Prosperity president Tim Phillips boasts about AFP’s successes in driving Washington politicians away from support for climate change mitigation and green energy, and into the sleazy embrace of climate change denial. This proves a key point of my blog post yesterday: a dominant majority of politicians, economic policy makers, and (MBA-bedecked) financial industry people are currently standing in the way of reasonable federal energy policy, support for progressive state energy policy, and private investment to develop a post-fossil economy. There is so much money and influence at stake that these puppets are selling their own integrity, scientific truth, country, and children’s futures down the river.
Really, it’s that simple now. For such an outrageous betrayal of their credibility, respected positions in society, education, the public communication spectrum, and civic duty, the likes of Tim Phillips and others named in the above article should not be surprised if mobs demand that they be dragged out of their fancy offices, tarred, feathered, and set out in stocks in the locations recently vacated by occupationists in major cities, and have eggs, rotten vegetables, excrement, and other appropriate matter thrown at them, because what they are inflicting on this nation is no better.
There is no other “theory” that works here. It’s purely and simply:
Huge Power + Threats to Huge Power = Huge Efforts at All Costs to Preserve Power
Unfortunately for us, this huge power derives from the fossil fuel complex, which is bad for all of us in balance.
Don’t they teach them that stuff in MBA programs?
OccupyMBA!
Jeremy Grantham of GMO came to our MBA program to speak last week. The title of his talk was “Irrational Avoidance of the Unpleasant: Perspectives on Investing, Resource Limitations & Global Warming.” It was a fantastic, well-attended talk by one of the most respected investment advisers in the world today, but he accidentally ended up almost duplicating one of his major criticisms of the mentality of Wall Street: climate change denial or willful ignorance.
He never meant to, of course. Look at his title! A point early in his talk was that, while 97% of scientists world-wide agree that human-induced global warming is taking place, the ratio is almost the reverse among Wall Street investment banks, brokers, traders, investors, the financial media, etc. As an extreme case, consider the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, with its endless aspersions toward climate science and climate scientists. What the heck are those monkeys doing? Idiots. Hypocrites, too. Rupert Murdoch and his editors at the “J” have their trembling tongues so deep in the honey pot of the fossil fuel complex that they’ll do anything to keep them sweet. And then of course go home to their swank estates in Greenwich and Darien fully aware that the climatologists are probably right. They are not fools. But their 1% incomes tell them to shut up about global warming and get with Exxon Mobil’s and Peabody Energy’s program. Which means keeping Wall Street a truth-free zone as far as climate is concerned. Beware of people who are paid handsomely to give the truth a wide berth.
Jeremy G. is to be forgiven. Time was limited, and he became so heavily focused on potential food scarcity, peak oil, mined phosphate and potassium depletion, and population growth that he never got to climate. There’s enough to be worried about anyway. But in their eager haste to always sound climatologically correct in front of their bribers, and in passing the contagion along to their even more obedient supplicants in Congress, the Wall Street establishment is doing the 99% a vast, ominous disservice, and you can bet your bottom dollar (which is probably all you have left) that the Masters of the Universe will have better means than you or I to adjust to the consequences of climate change. Country home near Chicoutimi, anyone? I hear there’s a new Friday evening shuttle leaving from the Midtown Skyport!
Wonder if that MBA Oath is starting to make a difference… After all, Wall Street probably has the highest MBA density of anywhere in the world (measured in MBAs per cubic centimeter). Don’t MBA programs these days emphasize realism, accuracy, and truth?! (Or is that only when there’s a big payoff at the end?)
Promise #5 of the Oath is:
“• I will protect the right of future generations to advance their standard of living and enjoy a healthy planet.”
As of today, 6,426 MBAs have sworn their fealty. Hm. That’s about 6% of all MBA enrollments in the US, annually. Considering the Oath has been around for 3 years, and that there are non-US signers, we can guess that perhaps 1% of annual MBA grads stake their self-respect, reputations, and honor before God and (wo)man upon dutifully carrying out Promise Number 5 above, which they are of course doing. The other 99% (a different 99%, please note) thus continue to swindle and shill, rogues of the hydrocarbon bosses, unannointed and unprotected by the goodness of the Fellowship of the Oath.
We have to save them, so they do us right! Let the truth prevail. Let them ALL swear the Oath, dedicate themselves to scientific truth and a healthy planet, and stand with the 97% (of climate scientists), so that people like Jeremy Grantham don’t have to continue revealing such a pathetic, pathologically criminal state of affairs.
That should be enough, right?
OccupyMBA!
I heard two very similar comments from MBA students in our program recently – each a smart, high-achieving young woman who is just completing our degree after two years of excellent performance. The comments are very telling.
“Mary,” who worked as a marketing manager in the financial sector prior to enrolling in our MBA program: ”I felt I might want to go to graduate school, but I never wanted an MBA. I mean, all my colleagues had MBAs, and I looked around at them and thought, there is no way I want to be like them.”
“Elizabeth,” who has worked as a project and product manager for a global energy company for more than a decade: ”I never wanted an MBA. I don’t even like business! I didn’t know there were alternative MBA programs out there.”
You have to ask yourself: are all the wrong people going to get MBA degrees, and all the right people staying away?
Present company excepted, of course… 
[Adapted from a talk I gave to the New England Board of Higher Education in 2010.]
Oaths & Trust: What do you believe in?
In 2001, after the tech bust, I was at a meeting of the Northern Virginia Tech Council. People were glum. An entrepreneur said: “Six months ago, if I had gone to a potential investor and said, I’m over 40, my company’s been in business for ten years, and every year sales have grown by 10-15%, I would have been laughed out of the room. Today, when I say, I’m over 40, we’ve been in business for ten years, and every year sales have grown by 10-15%, they say, ‘How much do you want?’
By 2003, investors might have swung to the former attitude of scorn. Today, you would be more likely to hear the latter again. Business performance and managerial skill, in the conventional sense, can look good or bad, depending on one’s vantage point, and one’s vantage point has a lot to do with how fast those around you are getting richer or poorer, especially if it’s through little effort of their own. Fear and greed!
Attitudes change as conditions change. Many of us become highly motivated by the possibility of short-term gains or losses.
What is the purpose of graduate business education? Is it about preparing practitioners to accelerate their careers with the upswings, reign triumphant at the peaks, dodge the falling masonry during the downturns, and cope during the slumps? To privatize the gains and socialize the losses?
Despite some exceptional persons and programs, conventional business education is dominated by opportunism and the short-term. It invokes justifications with moral overtones: rational markets, creative destruction, the Invisible Hand.
In this view, market actors and asset managers must be focused on the profitable exploitation of usually short-term opportunities. Maximization of shareholder value in high-velocity markets has increasingly been the sole focus of managerial expertise in recent decades.
“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good, “ said Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street (the year I started my MBA):
Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms–greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge–has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed–you mark my words–will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
Has the most recent cycle of fear and greed affected the culture of MBA programs, source of the new lifeblood of so many larger corporations? Are they ready to embrace sustainability – the possibility that life for humans and other living things can flourish on Earth forever?
The business school students have started swearing a morality oath. Thunderbird students launched one in 2006. Harvard Business School MBA students launched one year ago. As of a moment ago, 6406 MBA students from around the world had sworn. Here’s an excerpt:
• I will manage my enterprise with loyalty and care, and will not advance my personal interests at the expense of my enterprise or society.
• I will refrain from corruption, unfair competition, or business practices harmful to society.
• I will protect the right of future generations to advance their standard of living and enjoy a healthy planet.
• I will invest in developing myself and others, helping the management profession continue to advance and create sustainable and inclusive prosperity
This oath I make freely, and upon my honor
Well, it’s about time.
If the business schools will not transform themselves to truly embody these principles, at least the students can simply choose to live them.
“Just do the right thing.”
Although, how can the management profession continue to advance and create sustainable and inclusive prosperity? Doesn’t it need to start, first?
Anyway, what use is an oath?
Said Brutus,
…[B]ut do not stain the even virtue of our enterprise, nor th’insuppressive mettle of our spirits, to think that – or our cause – or our performance – did need an oath.
But let’s assume it will make some difference.
Are the new sustainability-oriented and “green” MBA programs we’re now seeing across the country redundant, now that high-octane MBA grads are repentant, swearing oaths?
Many of these innovative programs are start-ups, newcomers to business education, without the history, corporate support, heavy research capacity, or powerful brand names:
- Bainbridge Graduate Institute’s MBA in Sustainable Enterprise
- Presidio Graduate School’s MBA in Sustainable Management
- Dominican University’s Green MBA
- Antioch University New England’s Green MBA
- The Brandeis Global Green MBA
- Clark University’s MBA in Social Change
These are some of the attempts to fundamentally redesign and re-orient MBA education that have emerged since 2002, when pioneer Bainbridge was founded.
There is understandably skepticism about what we stand for, or at least, about our claims to be engaged in a distinct form of graduate management education. (Skepticism is healthy, to be sure! Having just marveled openly about the MBA Student Oath, am I mistaken in thinking that the claims of the “green” MBA programs are any more genuine?)
Ask: Whom do you trust most?
I trust what I have seen of the open, questioning intentionality of our kind of MBA program.
I trust the deep commitment to building authentic, inclusive, caring community, and to always being present as a whole individual.
I trust the turning away from impersonal, objectifying, manipulative corporate behavior, and toward the socially responsible businesses and social enterprises where the lessons are about health, about aligning with right values, and about honoring the dignity of all human beings.
I trust the interest in replacing extractive, exploitive industries with regeneration and resilience.
I trust the faith in the genius of place, and of the enthusiasm for local businesses and the relocalization of economies.
I trust the questioning of unconstrained corporate personhood, and the interest in for example beneficial corporations, employee ownership, and co-ops.
I trust the skepticism of hyperinstitutionalized academia, of the dominance of disciplines, of the rarified culture of academic publication.
I trust learning that thoroughly exercises the more immediate, practical skills of business while giving the momentous facts of our times the attention they deserve:
- climate change,
- peaking fossil fuel supplies
- human domination of the biosphere
- the crisis of our health and in our health care system
- the corruption among elected officials
- the concentration of wealth
- the erosion of the middle class
- our uncertain democracy.
I trust the hunger for deep ecological literacy and systems wisdom.
I trust the strong desire to learn from Nature as mentor.
I trust the absence of oaths. (Thank God that the General Assemblies have not yet introduced an “Occupation Oath” that all occupationists must swear! Hope that’s not coming down the pike…)
If we are not managing for sustainability, then what are we managing for? Less unsustainability? Opportunistic gains? Domination? A share of what’s left?
OccupyMBA.
