Archive for the ‘Meaning and Contribution for Leaders’ Category

Making Values Part of the B-School Curriculum

9:27 AM Wednesday May 26, 2010
by Sally Blount  | Comments ( 2)

From the Gilded Age to the Information Age, business leaders who attain rock star status have often been the deal makers. When a megatransaction is completed, we see front-page stories in the business press praising their financial savvy. And the engineers of the deal offer prescient insights into the global market dynamics.

It’s not surprising, then, that business students often see acquiring market-based, transactional knowledge as central to their education. Indeed, an understanding of markets is a valuable and essential part of a business education, and mathematically based economic models are the best tool available for providing insight into the behavior of markets and the actors within them. But if the past few years have taught us anything, they have reminded us that models are not reality and that free markets are not so easily captured by mathematical equations.

By contrast, the ethical, social, and cultural values that give meaning to the organizations and institutions where we spend our working lives defy any attempt at quantification. These values are crucial to helping business people achieve a deeper understanding of markets and their own organizations. Values guide us to the non-monetary worth and meaning of our work, along with the civic obligations that come with it. Values guide successful leaders in the way they interact and communicate with employees, customers, civil servants, investors and others who surround them. Many would argue that this type of values-based leadership is so important as to be priceless. Yet you almost never read stories about values-based leadership or how a megadeal supports a corporation’s approach to social responsibility.

At NYU’s Stern School of Business we have embraced the study of meaning, values, and corporate social responsibility through our Social Impact Core. The Social Impact Core is a required, four-course sequence. It is where our undergraduates explore the assumptions and implicit values that underlie markets and other social institutions, like the legal system and government agencies. Students actively explore and discuss how these institutions intersect to create meaning, conflicts, and ethical dilemmas in the lives of consumers, investors, executives, and politicians each day.

The Core covers previously uncharted territory in undergraduate education and makes significant demands on both the students’ time and the university’s resources — accounting for 14 out of 128 total credits required for graduation. The extensiveness of the program reflects our conviction that business schools must take responsibility for helping our students, the next generation’s leaders, to uncover and examine the ideologies and values that underlie the mathematical and governance models that we teach.

Note that it is not the goal of the Social Impact Core to teach values per se. Instead, the goal is to provide a compelling context for our students to uncover and examine their own assumptions and values and compare them to those espoused by other thinkers across the ages — in sources ranging from classical literature and philosophy to the contemporary leaders who are frequent visitors to the program.

Those visitors reflect a wide range of ideologies and backgrounds, from conservative business leaders like Steve Forbes to liberal politicians like Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. They appear in lively plenary sessions attended by all 550 of our first-year students. These plenaries are supplemented by twice-weekly seminar sessions, typically held to a maximum of 18 students, to encourage extensive face-to-face discussion. Substantive written assignments stimulate research and original thinking about the ideas examined in class. Subsequent courses lead students through stakeholder theory and the legal system, asking questions such as “Why do we need laws?” and “What is the purpose of the corporation?”

By senior year the social impact experience involves reading and discussing classic works by authors such as Cicero, Aristotle, and Gandhi on the ethical obligations of the individual. Students also learn to extract the messages about business and work delivered by Hollywood movies as well as in contemporary case studies.

 By forcing our students to examine and discuss assumptions, meaning, values, and social responsibility in different contexts across their four years, we hope to produce graduates who are comfortable with complex thought and do not easily fall prey to the illusions of mathematical quantification and oversimplified market ideologies. And while the Social Impact Core has been designed for our undergraduate program, I would argue that this intellectual approach is no less appropriate for MBA candidates.

Business is the dominant social institution of our time. The future stewards of that institution pass through our business schools during a period in their lives when they are arguably most open to exploring the relationships between personal values, markets, social obligations, and leadership. This is a responsibility business schools can’t afford to shirk and an opportunity we can’t afford to squander.

Sally Blount is the dean of the Stern School of Business Undergraduate College at New York University and dean designate of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

LIFTOFF LEADERSHIP response May 27,2010

At this time in human evolution, our world and its inhabitants are in critical need of high caliber leaders with integrity. What we are experiencing however, is an alarming display of leadership corruption, fraud, greed, and a disquieting lack of regard for the needs of the greater good.

As leaders we must embrace values that give the fullest meaning to personal existence and bring stability sustainability and hope to the future of mankind.

 Our future will reflect the values, morals and ethics that are instilled in society largely through leadership.

As to measuring the contribution of ethical social and cultural values in the workplace, I believe that there is a way to measure that.

I have come up with a concept, VOP.  The Value of People could be measured by employee surveys, customer surveys, Turnover, Retention, Performance Data and other data that someone more analytical than me could develop into a valid and relevant statistic. VOP would summarize and give a point in time indicator of the well being of the human side of the balance sheet. VOP would be a part of financial reporting and stimulate executive discussions about the overall morale and vitality of an organization.

I invite anyone interested in furthering this concept to get in touch.

VOP…every bit as important as EPS, ROI and other measures that have dominated thinking that has led us to where we are today.

 Our future will be shaped by many of the students that come through our MBA classes.

It is high time we turn it around and a key part of that shift in my opinion is in the B Schools. I applaud your efforts.

Betty Shotton

LIFTOFF Leadership