Archive for May, 2010

MBA oath

Posted May 25, 2010, under Zoom MBA
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A lot has been written this week about Larry Estrada, who will graduate from Harvard Business School next week and will begin to work at Goldman Sachs Group. Larry was insistent on starting at Goldman only after he signs the MBA ethics pledge developed at Harvard Business School.

While signing an oath is a good initiative, which will hopefully encourage MBAs to think more about ethics, in our view it could be easier to sign the oath than to actually implement it.

Here are a couple of observations about the realities of Wall Street life and some thoughts regarding integrating ethics into MBA curriculums.

  • Fresh MBAs starting to work on Wall Street don’t make any business decisions. They don’t decide which deals to execute, how to structure those deals and to whom securities will be sold. Therefore, a pledge to be ethical is somewhat theoretical.  Their more senior managers are the ones who will decide on all important details. Teaching students how to raise their doubts about ethical issues to their managers and how to discuss ethical dilemmas in a constructive and safe way may be just as valuable as actually signing the pledge.

  • Financial institutions are complex organizations and it may often be difficult for fresh MBAs to understand where the line between ethical and unethical lies. In our view, to solve this problem business schools could integrate ethical aspects into their existing curriculums and emphasize what ethical problems could arise in a variety of transactions and cases. Teaching ethics in a more general form, as some schools do, will be less helpful as students may have difficulty relating the theory they learned in class to specific business situations they encounter.

  • If schools decide to teach separate ethics classes, we believe that all such classes should be offered free of charge and be in addition to regular MBA curriculum requirements. In our view, charging MBA level fees for ethics classes may be challenging and not appealing to students.

  • Finally, more research should be done as to whether signing an ethics code is an effective tool to actually make organizations more ethical. We are wondering if anyone has examined how many “unethical” managers have signed internal ethical codes at their organizations before they were involved in “unethical behaviors”.  We would bet that these numbers are pretty high.  A better incentive structure may be a more effective answer to unethical behaviors. However, this problem is more related to those sitting in the boardrooms, not in the MBA classroom.

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Seven things that surprised us in the MBA.com 2010 Survey Report

Posted May 8, 2010, under Zoom MBA
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Recently MBA.com published its 2010 annual Survey Report which provides opinions, needs, and preferences of perspective business schools students.

ZoomInterviews took a look at the report and would like to highlight some interesting findings.

1. Is the financial crisis already forgotten?

Despite the financial crisis and mass layoffs in the financial industry, finance still remains the most attractive career path for potential applicants, with 35% of respondents saying that they are interested in a career in the financial industry.

2. MBA: degree with reservations

Only 10% of perspective students did not have doubts about pursuing their graduate education.  About half of the perspective students had reservations about financial aspects of their education and the likelihood of incurring large debts.  Cheaper MBA programs could encourage more applicants to consider this degree indeed.

3. Yes to soft skills and no to corporate governance and ethics?

Is the fact that business schools aren’t teaching classes on corporate governance and business ethics partially to blame for the crisis? According to the survey, schools may not be to blame for the lack of focus in these areas as students are uninterested in them.  These two important areas of study did not even make the list of subjects that students are interested in. Instead, students are more eager to learn about managing decision–making processes (82.2% of respondents), managing strategy and innovation (78.5%) and managing human capital (69.9%). Another statistic that we found to be quite surprising was that acquiring knowledge in general business functions came in only at fourth place (69.9% of respondents were interested to acquire these skills) among areas of study that students were interested in.

4. Gender differences exist

Men are mostly interested about learning how to manage strategy and innovation, while women, on the other hand, are more interested in acquiring the ability to manage administrative activities and task environments.

5. MBA applicants take their time to think and prepare

The overall transition time from considering the degree and applying for a graduate business program is about two years.  ZoomInterviews agrees that applying for a MBA is a very serious decision requiring extensive research and preparation.

6. Jobs are priority

The curriculum offered at a school came in fifth place among business school selection criteria, while career and financial aspects of the school topped the list. Schools working on revolutionizing their curriculum may consider revolutionizing job facilitation first.

7. Where are all the entrepreneurs?

20% of applicants intend to become self-employed upon graduation. According to our knowledge, a much lower percentage of students actually pursue entrepreneurship after school. Does this fact suggest that business schools discourage this career path by their recruiting policies and by not providing students with the support and tools they need to start their own businesses?

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