The recent signing of an ethically minded “MBA Oath” by hundreds of Harvard Business School graduates is a powerful gesture, “but oaths (and codes) are empty, even hypocritical rhetoric, if they’re not backed by more,” says HOW Online contributor Ben W. Heineman Jr. in a recent Harvard Business Review column.

Heineman cites as an example the massive bribery scandal of Siemens, Europe’s biggest engineering firm, which paid more than $1.5 billion in fines and penalties:

Siemens had a strongly worded code against bribery. It just lacked principles, practices and, ultimately, a culture to make that code a reality.

While signers of the Harvard oath promise to do a number of things during their careers — such as, to “act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner” and to “safeguard the interests” of shareholders, co-workers, customers and society” — the question becomes whether the MBA oath will effect far-reaching change, he says.

But it is, as the Oath’s Web site acknowledges, “a first step.”

In order to move forward the deep concerns underlying the oath toward more meaningful action, the MBA students who follow the oath-takers could engage the business school faculty in a few areas.

• They could question how the mission of the business school and its curriculum should be changed.
• Students could push the faculty to bring “its powerful collective intelligence to bear on what happened in the global economy in the past two years,” says Heineman, in the form of major conferences or volumes of intellectual-analysis essays.
• And students could help faculty increase the momentum for joint degrees and courses with the law school and the public policy and administration to teach “students multiple intellectual angles of attack on their respective core problems.”

Current MBAs should also press for discussions and panels with influential alums to explore these critical issues from a practical business perspective. As Heineman says:

With the crisis in capitalism, new graduates will have an opportunity to observe — and perhaps in a limited way to help shape — whether top business leadership can meet today’s challenges of responding to the outpouring of proposed regulation, balancing risk-taking (creativity and innovation) with risk-management (financial discipline) and fusing high performance with high integrity.

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