Let me start this post by saying that I am very proud of our MBA program here at Belmont. We have a long tradition of giving our student an applied education that has a heavy dose of ethics and entrepreneurship education. For years both of these topics have had required courses in our curriculum. Ethics is also something that we pay attention to throughout all of our coursework.
That being said, I think all business education needs to step back and take a serious look at our purpose. We are in an economic transition that has been unfolding for a couple of decades. The recent financial crisis and the current recession are just a couple of chapters in this tale of transformation. And we do not know what the ending of this tale will be.
Ben Cunningham passed along an article from the New York Times that looks at some of the rethinking that is going on in what have traditionally been thought of as the leading business schools in the country.
From that story:
For all of the emphasis on analytical rigor in business schools today, another major recommendation of the [Ford and Carnegie] foundations' reports from the 1950s -- that business become a true profession, with a code of conduct and an ideology about its role in society -- got far less traction, said Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of "From Higher Aims to Hired Hands," a historical analysis of business education.
Business schools, he said, never really taught their students that, like doctors and lawyers, they were part of a profession. And in the 1970s, he said, the idea took hold that a company's stock price was the primary barometer of success, which changed the schools' concept of proper management techniques.
I must admit that much of what we have focused on in our entrepreneurship programs have been heavily focused on skills and techniques. While important, I agree with Professor Khurana that we need to aim much higher.
Toward that end, I have been offering a new class for our graduate students studying entrepreneurship called Entrepreneurship: The Driver of Social, Cultural, and Economic Transformations.
In this class, as the course title implies, we have been exploring not only the role entrepreneurs play in building our economy, but their role in shaping society and culture.
We started the class reading the book I co-authored with Mike Naughton, Bringing Your Business to Life. We explored how integrating values and faith into our businesses creates a much different understanding of what success really means.
It has been an eye opening experience for the students and for their instructor.
I think most of us are coming out of the experience of the course with a much broader view of the responsibilities that entrepreneurs will play into future.
Success is not just about creating wealth. While that is part of the equation, it cannot be the sole function we play.
Entrepreneurs must also understand the role that they and their employees play in building communities and society, and the impact that they can have in shaping our culture.
I believe that this understanding is the first step on the road to creating a true sense of what it really means to be a business professional and to begin to grasp the immense weight of the responsibility entrepreneurs have to our society.
