Support for a professional oath of honor for business graduates grew even more Monday when the Oath Project announced a new alliance with the United Nations Global Compact and the Principles for Responsible Management Education in support of the cause.
The initiative to establish an MBA oath similar to the Hippocratic oath doctors take before practicing medicine has been gaining steam over the past few years. Thunderbird School of Global Management adopted an oath in 2005, a group of Harvard Business School students launched a grassroots effort, MBAOath.org, in 2008, and the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders put forth a Global Business Oath at the recent annual Davos forum in January.
To coordinate these various efforts into one voice, Thunderbird President Ángel Cabrera and Harvard business professors Rakesh Khurana, Rob Kaplan and Nitin Nohria established the Oath Project. Earlier this week, the UN Global Compact, a leadership initiative founded in 2000 for companies committed to sustainability and responsible business practices, and the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Management Education, a platform promoting responsible management education supported by almost 300 business schools, announced that they have joined the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, the MBA Oath, the Aspen Institute and the Association of Professionals in Business Management as founding partners of the Oath Project.
“The Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative endorses the Oath because it could become a fitting tool to place at the core of management education the values of sustainability and good corporate citizenship,” Manuel Escudero, head of the PRME Secretariat, said in a statement. He added that both the PRME and the Oath reflect an urgent global need for leaders who commit to serving society in their roles as business managers.
Georg Kell, executive director of the UN Global Compact, pledged his support as well. “The Oath Project represents a critical effort to embed management education and training in a broader context of business ethics,” he said.
Thunderbird’s Cabrera, one of the first vocal proponents for an MBA Oath, pointed to the global financial crisis as an indicator of the responsibility business leaders hold in society at large. “Managers are entrusted with incredible power to create or destroy value, and in so doing, affect the lives of thousands if not millions of people,” he said. “This is a power that should not be taken lightly and, as with medical or legal professionals, requires professional standards and ethics that govern its use,” he continued.
The Oath Project, with its growing roster of founding partners, hopes to serve as a hub to support the work of the individuals and organizations that have already been working to promote the concept of an MBA oath. The leaders of the Oath Project believe that for the project to succeed, the management education community needs to come to consensus around a single oath for all to share.
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Read the full article: MBA Oath Initiative Grows as Global Organizations Lend Support