Future executives might be feeling stabs of conscience, according to a survey recently released by the Aspen Institute.
Polling just under 1,700 business students -- including some of those at the Wharton School of Business -- the Colorado-based non-profit found that maximizing shareholder value was no longer most important to the majority of respondents. Customers' needs now have first-place status in MBA students' hearts the survey found.
The changes contrast noticeably with a similar study completed in April 2001.
The new survey also suggested that there may be problems with schools' ethics training programs. Twenty percent of the students surveyed reported receiving no ethics training at all. Around half expressed that what's taught in MBA programs might have actually contributed to the recent wave of business scandals.
Yet, Wharton formally incorporates ethics into its curriculum to a greater extent than its peer schools, according to Legal Studies professor Thomas Donaldson.
"We're proud of that," he said. "We're starting a new Ph.D. program in ethics.... It keeps this as an academic subject."
Wharton legal studies professor and ethics specialist Alan Strudler said that the ethics courses taught at Wharton are "wildly popular, among the most popular courses taught."
Strudler noted that many of the ethics programs that have cropped up in wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals are hardly guarantees of ethical behavior among graduates.
"There are a number of institutions that sell ethics training, that try to give people simple answers" to ethical questions, he said. "And they make a lot of money doing it."
Nevertheless, Strudler suggested that no program can "solve all the problems in the world."
"If somebody gets offered millions of dollars to do something wrong, no matter how many classes they get, they'll sometimes say yes," he said.
National Public Radio commentator and Associate Dean of Executive Development at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, Dave Logan concurred that "you don't make someone ethical by having them repeat back ethical principles."
"Ethics has become right and wrong, a kindergarten definition of ethics," he said. "I take a much broader view."
Also arguing for a broader definition of ethics, legal studies professor Christopher Michaelson suggested the importance of an internal perspective in the business world.
While the Aspen Poll also noted a drop in the readiness of MBA students to leave a company that they knew was committing coporate fraud, Michaelson did not see this an necessarily negative sign.
"More optimistically, it's possible that respondents don't think that leaving is the best or only option available to them," Michaelson said. "They may think that they can change things for the better from within."
When employees believe in their companies, Logan asserted, success -- both economic and ethical -- tends to follow.
"Take Amgen, the biotech company," he offered, noting that there, employees are aware that lives will be saved or lost as a direct result of their performance. "I will eat my shoe if they ever lie or exaggerate earnings."
Logan presented a positive take on the increased attention the public airing of corporate America's dirty laundry has earned.
"I do a lot of work in Japan," Logan said. "I think that if Enron had happened in Japan... that it would have been dealt with quietly or secretly. The fact that our system is so open, so transparent means that, when we eventually emerge from this, we'll emerge from it lightyears ahead of the Japanese and the Europeans."
Logan also argued that "it's the perfect time to ask those ethical questions," concluding that "when you see a group of people who all work for the same company... excited about what they're doing, that's not conceptual, that makes an immediate difference in what the people do."
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