Three professors from Yale School of Management generated a lot of buzz and commentary in the B-school universe earlier this week with their piece on teaching ethics to MBAs, published Monday by the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Rodrigo Canales and Dr. Cade Massey are assistant professors, and Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski is an associate professor, of organizational behavior at Yale SOM. Their article Promises Aren’t Enough: Business Schools Need to Do a Better Job Teaching Students Values, addresses the continued hot topic of an MBA Oath.

While the professors laud the notion of future business leaders acting ethically and keeping greed at bay, they believe “such oaths sound much like chastity vows taken by thousands of teens every year. The problem in both cases is not a lack of sincerity, but a failure to adequately prepare for the moment of truth.”

The danger with such oaths, they say, is that they create a false sense of moral inoculation, and MBAs who take an ethics oath without enough supporting leadership education are likely more vulnerable to ethical breaches.

The professors discuss how situational forces drive behavior to a surprising extent, what business schools need to do to effectively teach leadership and ethics, and why experiential learning is the best way to prepare students for the difficult decisions they will face—often under enormous pressure.

To read more from the Yale SOM community regarding the MBA ethics pledge, see our piece from May which explores the areas of concern that Yale SOM students and faculty have with a business oath.

Deans Judy Olian of UCLA Anderson School of Management and Rich Lyons of Berkeley Haas School of Business tweeted their recommendation of the article and are in agreement with much of what Canales, Massey and Wrzesniewski  put forth. Check out the full article and leave us a comment letting us know your thoughts below.

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In the real world, medical doctors, engineers and MBAs must learn to speak each other’s language in order to find answers to stubborn health problems. To facilitate that cross-communication, the Stanford Graduate School of Business and School of Medicine — plus the departments of mechanical engineering and bioengineering — jointly offer a course in Biodesign Innovation.

In this video, a team of graduate students are running with an idea to manufacture an affordable device for home dialysis that lessens the chance of patients developing internal infections.

Three real-world products have been born as biodesign class projects since the business school became involved with the program in 2004, yet creating companies isn’t the program’s top goal, said Stefanos Zenios, a member of the business school faculty who co-teaches the course with Paul Yock, the Martha Meier Weiland Professor of Medicine, and Todd Brinton, a clinical assistant professor of medicine (cardiology).

“We are teaching students the process of innovation,” said Zenios. “It is important for us to educate students about how to identify medical needs, invent solutions for those needs, and determine if the solutions are commercially viable. Whether they actually create a business is inconsequential. Being able to analyze that process is what matters the most.”

For more on this unique course bringing diverse graduate students together, read the complete story on the Stanford website.

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The dean of Spain’s ESADE Business School, Alfons Sauquet, wrote an intriguing editorial in The Economist earlier this summer that bears a second look. In it, Sauquet argues that a disconnect between business and science is holding Europe back, and, if left unresolved, will diminish Europe’s future.

The goal, he says, is learning how to bring the science and business communities together efficiently, and concentrating solely on functional training is not enough.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Europe’s approach to innovation must change,” Sauquet explains. “The region may be blessed with high-quality scientific research, but too much of it fails to make it to the realms of innovation.”

Here’s where business schools can make all the difference, playing what the dean calls the role of the entrepreneur in its purest meaning.

“It is no longer enough that we concentrate on functional training. We must constantly scan for projects to which we can add value. Once found, we must take a more developmental, consulting role, helping the project’s different stakeholders—companies, public bodies, research centres and universities—to create and manage the organisation. And we must help design and implement the processes necessary to make European innovation work,” Sauquet says.

Business schools can play a profound role in promoting innovation management, but they should also explore what Sauquet calls the “slippery idea” of creativity. Citing the world of creative design as one example, the dean says B-schools can create programs that help managers to look differently at their practices, using ethnographical methods and tools inspired by design thinking.

“If we accept that innovation stems from science and moves towards creativity, we must also acknowledge that we must create environments that promote innovation,” says Sauquet. “Business schools should not be afraid to provide the Petri dishes on which new ideas are spawned.”

To read more of the specific programs and methods ESADE has implemented to help bridge the science/business gap, follow this link.

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Dean Rich Lyons of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, in the news regularly since unveiling curriculum changes at the school, tweeted yesterday with a link to a list of ten business trends that we thought you’d like to hear about.

1. The trend is toward testing new business ideas with cost‐effective experimentation, versus traditional planning.
2. The trend is toward solving business problems with more discipline “upstream” at the problem finding and problem framing stages.
3. The trend is toward flatter organizations and distributed authority, with less reliance on command and control, particularly given demographic shifting toward millennials.
4. The trend is toward greater disruption of revenue models as new entrants get paid differently from incumbents.
5. The trend is toward new methods for recognizing business opportunities and how to approach them.
6. The trend is toward transparency in decision‐making, while maintaining flexibility over time in organizational structure and decision rights.
7. The trend is toward more disciplined approaches to business risk selection.
8. The trend is toward more fluid boundaries of the organization and greater weight on stakeholders with conflicting interests.
9. The trend is toward organizing work in highly interdependent teams.
10. The trend is toward new ideas and their implementation as the engine of economic value.

To read The Economist’s coverage of the curriculum changes at the school, click here. And to see a nifty illustration of “The New Path to Innovative Leadership at Haas”, follow this link.

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July 1st was Nitin Nohria‘s first day as dean of Harvard Business School, and he marked the occasion with a video message on the school’s website expressing his sense of responsibility for continuing the school’s legacy of groundbreaking ideas and transformational educational experiences.

“I recognize that we stand at a unique moment in time,” Nohria writes, “and I am energized by the challenges that lie ahead. With business education at an inflection point, we must strive to equip future leaders with the competence and character to address emerging global business and social challenges.”

HBS has always been at the cutting edge of the practice of business, and Nohria says that as the epicenter of business has become more widely distributed, there’s an appetite in the world for the school to show what the future of management education should look like.

The link above will take you to the video message from the dean, but here are edited excerpts from the key areas Nohria addresses.

Globalization

Harvard Business School has to become more global, because we have to be the place that people can come to and feel that they’re getting the world’s best thinking, that they’re learning about the world’s most cutting-edge companies. And as those companies and that thinking is becoming more global, Harvard Business School inevitably has to become more global than it is today.

Preparing students to lead

A brand-new set of challenges faces future MBAs, which means that HBS must prepare students to lead in this world, contribute to this world, and create the prosperity that the community expects business leaders to provide.

Alumni

If you think about who owns this school, really its the alumni, because they’re the ones who carry the label ‘I’m a Harvard Business School MBA’. They really are the ambassadors for what this school stands for. We have no other way of knowing whether we make a difference were it not for the successes and accomplishments of our alumni.

Research with impact

The intellectual life that we have at HBS is one of the joys and treasures of the school. It’s very much at the center of what a great university needs to be about: producing great ideas that actually have an impact on the world. Harvard Business School needs to be a leader in the research arena as much as it needs to be a leader in the classroom.

Looking forward

We should never rest on our laurels. The challenges that leaders in the world today face have become more complex, and the school needs to continue to prepare them for those challenges.

For more media coverage on Nitin Nohria, click here.

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The June issue of GMAC’s Deans Digest features an interview with dean Rich Lyons of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Lyons, who will provide a keynote speech on “path-bending leaders” for the GMAC Annual Industry Conference next week, talks about where he sees graduate management education headed and how B-schools must build innovative leaders.

Below are two edited excerpts from the interview; you can read the entire Q&A here in the latest Deans Digest.

Q: Where do you think graduate management education is headed in the short term and farther out? What general trends do you see?

A: [...] If we look at business schools more introspectively, one element that we’re grappling with more and more is our own culture. The great organizations are invariably described by strong norms and values. As we start to think about how we are creating norms among students who come to our business schools, it seems to me that we have been a lot less deliberate than we need to be about the norms and values that we are reinforcing, whether it’s about career choice, or thinking about one’s role in society and the way one manages and leads.

I think firms are much more deliberate about this than business schools are. Firms get paid for being usefully different. Another macro theme, therefore, is how do business schools develop leaders that are producing useful differentness? How do we build organizational capacity for differentness? I think that is absolutely fundamental, and I think we have some hard thinking to do in that area.

Q: In your view, what are the one or two greatest challenges facing graduate management education today?

A: One has to look at the broader social context and understand that society is not that happy with us as business schools. So a major challenge is to respond intelligently to the fact that we are part of a system that performed very poorly over the last three years. Are we to blame? Obviously not exclusively, but we are part of that system. So that’s a major near-term challenge—what will society want to see, and how will we deliver it? For example, do we need to be more deliberate about reinforcing norms and values? Should we have a code of conduct?

Another challenge is when we admit people into business schools, increasingly it’s the case that you can’t have stumbled. [The usual mindset is that] if you got a C in a class, didn’t do so well on the GMAT, or had some interruption in your career path, you won’t land where you want to land. Industry wide, therefore, we are de facto selecting people who haven’t run the big experiments in their lives that they might have. This could be one of those unintended consequences that is having more impact than we realize.
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