Harvard's MBA Oath Goes Viral

What started as a pledge to do no harm by 2009 graduates of the elite business school has quickly gone global, but not everybody's on board

By Anne VanderMey

When most people think of professionals whose "purpose is to serve the greater good," MBAs don't leap to mind. That's probably part of the reason authors of a new oath for MBAs, which uses those words in the opening sentence, set such modest goals for the project. Started by 33 second-year MBA students at Harvard Business School (Harvard Full-Time MBA Profile) as a way to bolster B-school ethics, the group originally hoped 100 of their classmates in the Harvard class of 2009 would sign up to "act with utmost integrity." At the time, it seemed like a stretch.

But something about the project struck a chord. Maybe it was the desire to distance themselves from B-school villains of the financial crisis, or an effort to get a head start on their future careers in the nonprofit world, or maybe it was genuine idealism. But whatever the cause, the oath has quickly taken on a life of its own. Within weeks, more than half of Harvard's class of 2009 had signed. Perhaps more interestingly, it didn't stop at Harvard Yard. MBAs around the world forwarded the oath to friends, gathering nearly 800 signatures to date. Max Anderson, the 2009 Harvard graduate who came up with the idea, said he received requests from people at more than 25 schools around the world about bringing it to their campuses. He still sounds a little awed: "Our inbox has just exploded."

So far, people from 115 countries representing 49 languages have visited the MBA Oath Web site, where visitors can also find links to some of the articles that helped to spread the word. While some campuses have asked for help adapting it, e-mails have been circulating independently at others. About 40 students at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management (Kellogg Full-Time MBA Profile) have signed on, along with more than 30 students at Oxford University's Saïd Business School (Saïd Full-Time MBA Profile). Anderson says the group plans to translate the code into German, French, and Spanish because of multiple requests. And representatives of schools in Iceland and Norway have expressed interest in adapting it.

This isn't the first time the MBA industry has made a stab at establishing a code of morality, but it does seem to be the first effort that has the potential to catch on with a broader audience. Critics of the movement say that the oath is simply an effort by students to shield themselves from the populist rage at the role MBAs played in the current financial crisis and that the ethics push will fade once the economy stabilizes. But some B-school leaders caution that such a conclusion underestimates the younger generation. There's a possibility, they say, the oath is only the tip of the iceberg, and that a bigger change—in student sentiment, business school programs, and what it means to be an MBA—is poised to hit the business education world.

Management as a Vocation

Despite their modest short-term goals, the oath's creators have big plans for the future of the project. In addition to eventually having hundreds of thousands of MBAs sign the pledge, they want it to be part of a much more ambitious agenda to professionalize the occupation of management, transforming it into a vocation much like medicine or law. The idea was proposed by Harvard professors Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria in a paper last year that called for a "rigorous code of ethics" for managers. Anderson and his teammates worked with them and used some of their analytical framework while developing the text of the oath.

As Khurana says, there was "nothing novel" about the idea of management as a profession. A moral compass was built into the original proposals for business schools more than a century ago, though it has rarely been fully fleshed out. Other programs and organizations have some existing form of the MBA oath. The University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business (Ivey Full-Time MBA Profile) has a class ring that graduates wear to remind them of their commitment to honesty. And at the Thunderbird School of Global Management (Thunderbird Full-Time MBA Profile), graduating MBAs have recited a moral pledge at commencement since 2006.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.