Fostering Ethical Leaders

The world, of course, needs business professionals and business schools are still the best way to contribute to that end. Perhaps more importantly, however, the world needs “business citizens”. Business schools have the potential to transform students into those types of individuals, a potential that hasn’t been realised enough yet.

- Dr Karthick Sridhar

Over the past few decades, business schools have not always been able to build business leaders with a societal vision or a moral compass. Many of the figures entangled with ethical failures graduated from the top business schools, leading one to question what exactly is being taught there and what is being missed. Over the course of their educational journey—whether in an undergraduate business degree or an MBA—many students do not show a recognisable elevation in moral development. On the contrary, sometimes the moral stance of students gets murkier with a business education.

This could be attributed to the overwhelmingly narrow focus on the economic aspects that some business educators reinforce, even if inadvertently. In many business courses, emphasis on profit maximisation dominates the educational discourse. Despite an increased importance given to ethics education, reflected either in terms of offering stand-alone courses or in terms of embedding ethics within teaching in each class, the message does not seem to sink in. Profit maximisation remains an explicit prime, almost exclusive, virtue in many business schools.

Today, we can look at how some of best business schools can increase their legitimacy by not only focusing on professional development, but also on the development of their students as “business citizens”—the unrealised potential of business schools in character development and how this would eventually contribute to societal development.

A Case for Business Schools