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Davos: Young Global Leaders unveil Global Business Oath
News Bärbel Schwertfeger - 27.01.2010
Thunderbird School of Global Management President Ángel Cabrera will lead a panel discussion on business ethics in conjunction with the public launch of the Global Business Oath, an initiative of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. The oath will be during the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The Global Business Oath (Watch video) is intended to be a set of global principles that serve as a guide when business leaders face difficult trade-offs and paradoxes while leading their organizations.
The Young Global Leaders (YGL) began the initiative at last year’s Forum. Over the past year, Cabrera and other YGL members drafted the Oath, which is now available online for all managers and executives worldwide to sign voluntarily. By signing this Oath, corporate leaders promise to manage their enterprises diligently and in good faith. Business executives worldwide will be invited to sign the oath during the Davos conference and beyond. More than 200 business leaders already have pledged to lead their organizations according to these principles and, over the course of 2010, the YGL Oath Task Force hopes to expand its reach and impact.
The Global Business Oath will be discussed and promoted throughout the World Economic Forum, including during a session that Cabrera will moderate Jan. 28. The session, “Rethinking Business Ethics”, will focus on how the 2008 financial crisis highlighted shortcomings of simply teaching the analysis of ethical problems to prepare future business leaders for the paradoxes of the real world.
Cabrera also will blog daily about the Global Business Oath and other topics discussed at the annual meeting on Harvard Business Review’s website and on his own blog on Thunderbird’s Knowledge Network.
The Thunderbird president is seen as one of the world’s foremost advocates of business ethics, corporate responsibility and oaths of honor for business school graduates and managers worldwide. Under his leadership, Thunderbird became the first business school in the world to incorporate a professional Oath of Honor for its graduates in 2004. Thunderbird’s oath, which made headlines following the financial crisis, has been the benchmark from which students from other schools, like Harvard, have developed their own oaths.
In 2006, Cabrera was asked by the UN Global Compact to chair a global taskforce that developed the “Principles for Responsible Management Education”, which serve to strengthen the role of business schools in promoting ethics and corporate citizenship. More than 250 schools from around the world have endorsed them.
Thunderbird has more than 60 years of experience in developing leaders with the global mindset, business skills and social responsibility necessary to create real, sustainable value for their organizations, communities and the world.
www.thunderbird.edu
Do business school presidents sign an oath to act ethically and abide by certain standards of honorable behavior? I don’t mean an employment contract like any MBA graduate would sign upon employment, but an actual behavioral oath like the ones they are asking their students to sign.
Some questions worth pondering….
What if a business school president used the marketing resources of his academic institution to promote his personal agenda and stardom while he allowed his school to slip in the MBA rankings due to lack of leadership attention? Would that be ethical?
What if a business school president gives his spouse a title and affiliation with his school and highlights her on the school’s web site to promote her consulting business? Would that be ethical?
What if a business school president talks about the importance of culture while systematically destroying the culture of his institution? Would that be ethical?
What if a business school president preaches the importance of collaboration and shared governance but surrounds himself with administrative sycophants and ignores the voice of his faculty? Would that be ethical?
These conditions exist at a business school today in which MBA students are strongly encouraged by the school’s president to sign the Oath. Is this disconnect between espoused values and actual behavior typical of what comes from the privileged circles of business school presidents and their cronies in the Davos think tanks? I surely hope not.
Perhaps business school presidents need to commit to ethical and honorable behavior before asking others to do so.