<p>As a MBA, I should take offense at your comment–but actually there is so much truth to it that I have to agree.</p>
<p>MBA schools in general have always taken the same approach–that the whole purpose of a company is to gain money for the shareholders. This “effort to excel”–and it’s spin-off theory–that we should reward those who take the greatest risk–totally overlooks the downside theories (that risk needs to be monitored), and the theory that companies may actually have some responsibility to the community in which they do business, and to their employees. Plus, recently, there isn’t even an effort to increase shareholder value–but rather just an effort to increase executive compensation. How else can one explain why executive compensation was still increasing in 2007 and 2008 even as the economy was tanking worldwide–and why executive compensation averaged 35 times an average employee’s compensation back in 2007?</p>
<p>Business schools never had any courses on this–corporate social responsibility or business ethics–until after the Enron and Worldcom scandals back in 2001. As a result, companies have been driven entirely by the bottom-line (and what one can get away with, legal or not) for years. Even now, we see the end-result of this. Companies that are still trying to pay millions to those who lost billions even as the communities they are in are closing schools, small businesses are dying, and unemployment skyrockets.</p>
<p>I’m hopeful that the tide will now turn, but apparently that won’t be happening until we start getting rid of some executives in the financial (Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Citibank) and insurance (AIG) fields that are still living in the pre-Enron and pre-Worldcom environments.</p>