Business Schools: A Failing Grade on Ethics

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Mary C. Gentile, PhD

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The typical business ethics classroom is too often a kind of school for scandal, where students read case studies and then spend 90 minutes outlining all the reasons why being ethical is not so easy, or even so clear after all. Often we hear: "Well, when I'm CEO I can take action on this kind of decision, but as a middle manager, I have neither the power nor the influence to do so." On the other hand, when students put themselves in the place of the CEO, we hear: "Well, if I were lower in the organization, I might be able to take this kind of personal risk and stand up against this behavior. But I have the jobs and lives of thousands of employees and investors depending on me. I can't afford the luxury of my values." Sounds like Citi (C) Chief Executive Chuck Prince in July 2007, a few months before his resignation, when he said: "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance."

A New Way

But there is a new curriculum—Giving Voice to Values—that brings an entirely different and much needed approach to the challenges of responsible businesses and that, in its own way, is a resounding response to the President's call for the rest of us to be more willing and able to make the hard choices. Without denying the value of building awareness and developing stronger analytical skills, Giving Voice to Values is premised on the assumption that in many if not most of the managerial and financial misbehaviors that we have seen, there were enough people who recognized the lapses in ethics and judgment to have stopped them. The problem was that they did not believe it was possible to do so.

Giving Voice to Values starts from the premise that the case study actor knows what he or she believes is right and wants to do it, and then asks: How can we get this done? What will we need to say, to whom, when, and in what sequence? What are the kinds of countervailing "reasons and rationalizations" that we are likely to hear and what will be the most persuasive responses?

And then, drawing upon the vocabulary of the field, whether it is accounting or marketing or something else, and building upon the latest research about how to frame and deliver compelling arguments, students practice delivering their arguments out loud, in front of each other, working together to collaboratively strengthen them. The collective product of these peer coaching sessions is the best possible "script" and action plan for voicing our values, as well as the opportunity to practice delivering it in front of classmates who stand in as proxy for our future colleagues.

Practice Leads to Action

The conviction behind this new ethics curriculum—and one that is supported by both qualitative research as well as neuropsychological studies—is that practice makes perfect, or at least, practice makes it far more likely that action, when it's needed, will be taken. After all, despite a never-before-seen complexity in financial products like credit default swaps, the reasons we give for why we do what we do are pretty familiar: "I didn't think we'd get caught," "I didn't know how to say 'no,'" "Everyone else was doing it," and so on. If we get comfortable responding to those arguments, in fresh, persuasive, nondefensive ways, just think of what might happen.

If students have the opportunity to work together to craft these "scripts," they can also begin to see these statements not as coming from a place of self-righteousness—something few of us can truly claim and a stance that rarely wins followers—but as coming from a place of competence and conviction.

Or as our President might say, a place of collective responsibility.

Mary Gentile is director of Giving Voice to Values, an educational consultant, and a former Harvard Business School faculty member and administrator. Giving Voice to Values has been developed with support from The Aspen Institute and Yale School of Management and is currently in use at nearly 60 educational institutions worldwide.