Harvard Begins Case Study as Tainted MBAs Reveal Damaged Brand 1

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Bloomberg (2 April 2009) reports Harvard Begins Case Study as Tainted MBAs Reveal Damaged Brand. Uh-oh.  Too late? Stanley O’Neal and John Thain (ex-CEO’s of Merrill Lynch), Rick Wagoner (ex-CEO of General Motors). Do you remember others? I bet you can remember at least one more.

Update:  An old friend, who is a retired HBS professor, just wrote to me regarding this article.  ‘Same old, same old. No one has to know what the hell he’s doing, just develop better gut instincts?’

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One thought on “Harvard Begins Case Study as Tainted MBAs Reveal Damaged Brand”

  • SteveG

    Okay, I’ll bite, was the other graduate you are thinking about George W. Bush?

    I think what is being missed here is the study of possible systemic faults in the economy that encourage excess risk taking. As the study of quality issues in manufacturing shows, even good workers are hard pressed to overcome systemic problems.

    You can teach ethics and social responsibility all you want, but if the system rewards excess risk taking and punishes risk management, then that education is bound to fail on average.

    So it is to students like George Bush and to former SEC Chairman Christopher Cox that you have to drive home the idea of fixing systemic problems.

    Neither one of them had a clue about the damage that the systemic problems were doing. Let me be clear, lack of regulation allowed the cheatering professional investors to be rewarded and the prudent professional investors to be punished. The cheaters made what seemed to be large financial profits for their investor clients. They in turn were financially rewarded with large bonuses, lots of clients, and other professional advancements. The prudent professional investors’ performance seemed to be relatively inferior to the cheaters. They were punished with low bonuses, loss of clients, and being fired.

    This kind of reward system drives out the ethically strong professionals. The system tempts the ethically weak to modify their own behavior for the worse. Worst of all, the completely unethical investor gets the most rewards.

    I have made the point about systemic problems in the previous post The Obama Code where I discussed the ideas of George Lakoff and W. Edwards Deming.