According to international specialized press, Harvard MBAs are promising to be honorable.
Obligations of honor in corporate life were explicitly revived in academic settings following the financial calamities wrought by criminals who emerged accredited with the exact training promoted by elite universities like Harvard. Judicial condemnation and the definitive moral reprobation of some of the most prominent Masters in Business Administration would constitute a catastrophe for the executive education enterprise.
For at least three decades, major Anglo-Saxon universities have developed and exported an executive training model based on the premise that management is a portfolio of skills dedicated to shareholder value creation. Yet the ideology of shareholder value also harbors an executive perspective: the more value created for the owners, the greater the financial compensation due to those who manage the enterprise. Simplistically put, it is impossible to educate someone to work tirelessly to enrich anonymous shareholders—provisional holders of equity—without the tacit understanding that this enrichment must be “shared” with those who invest their talent and time in high-yield, albeit alien, businesses.
Of course, value distributed as dividends represents a return on invested capital, but that paradigm applies only to shareholders with a stable, long-term view. For the rest—almost always the majority—value creation translates into market stock appreciation. Consequently, shareholder payouts often stem from trading capital rather than direct corporate disbursements. The company does not spend a single penny on market-driven capital gains; those are paid by other buyers.
When the educational system favored by business executives prioritizes stock-market symmetry, management becomes subservient to a speculative logic where emotional market sentiment outweighs factual, accounting-relevant performance. Academic training amplifies this tendency by celebrating speculators who enrich themselves through market appropriation.
However, while value paid to shareholders comes from other investors, executive bonuses, salaries, and performance kickbacks subtract directly from the corporate bottom line. Executives enjoy an unblushing advantage over risk-bearing capitalists: they suffer no market losses and face no capital immobilization, extracting a percentage of the upside via stock options purchased at deep discounts that virtually guarantee massive windfalls.
An educational system that teaches tricks masquerading as management techniques inevitably validates illegitimate appropriation, branding it as “strategy” and “business planning.” In doing so, universities cultivate moral criminals primed to act for prizes detached from business permanence and solidity. That the international financial crisis dismantled some of these networks and exposed illegitimate tactics provides ample reason for MBA factories to care about the moral health of their student-clients.
It is entirely natural that subjects once left to family upbringing or moral instruction now appear as mandatory MBA courses. Being honorable is a commendable lesson to learn in school, yet we can only wish the institution did not dishonor the foundations of ethics by teaching mechanics divorced from the ultimate end of the Good.
Paulo Fidalgo
CEO of Marketividade
