The Harvard Business School oath
Recently the MBA program I am attending decided that the Harvard Business School oath would be offered at graduation. It is this that prompted me to give a lecture about why this particular oath is misguided and dangerous and from that lecture evolved this article.
I believe that the HBS oath is an overreaction to the latest financial crisis. More fundamentally however, I believe that it is part of a movement which seeks to undermine the private sector and harness it for the “social good.”Or in other words to socialize the private sector on highly dubious grounds.
The stated mission of the oath is as follows: “One day, all business leaders will hold themselves to the higher standard of integrity and service to society that is the hallmark of a true professional.” Yet we as managers are not social servants. This insidious line of thinking carries us to the brink of socialism. Reading the oath one realizes that four out of 7 points spell out a positive social agenda, and claims that this is merely a personal oath to be taken at one's choosing are put in doubt by the fact that the names of the oath takers will be displayed on-line for posterity. Then there are promises, or rather the threats by the oath creators that the next item on the agenda is to “give the oath more teeth.” Just what that means is a mystery but it would be wise, as I will attempt to show, to beware.
This oath is dangerous because it is part of a movement that seeks to level a direct frontal assault on liberty. The catch phrase has for a while now been “social justice.” But social justice cannot be attained unless society, which is an aggregate of hundreds or thousands of daily decisions by millions of people, is harnessed towards some common ends, usually by coercion the magnitude of which correlates with the ambitions of these social do-gooders. And the ambitions tend to grow over time.
It has always been the hallmark of liberty that we are free agents pursuing our own ends within the confines of the law. For business this means pursuing profits while playing by the rules.Yet the pursuers of social justice, if they are to succeed, must be able to channel the acts of free agents towards the ends they wish to achieve, and the only way to do this is by coercion. With business this usually takes the form of blackmail and outright extortion, with the media giving a helping hand. Nothing is easier than extorting money from a business, all it takes is some negative press and God knows there has been more than enough media outlets willing to help out. The general acceptance by society of the idea of social justice and the social responsibility of corporations to fund all sorts of pet projects is a sad degeneration of a society from free people to addicts hooked on handouts and the oath is simply another dirty needle.
This oath, by specifying the ends that business is obligated to pursue tramples over the whole idea of free agents pursing their own ends within the confines of an abstract and non-instrumental law, the very foundation of liberty and by extension a free market.
The problem is further complicated by the wording of the thing, so vague and so open ended as to put the manager at the whim of just about any special interest imaginable. We are not to advance our personal interests at the expense of the interests of our enterprise or society, yet what is meant by interests of society is anyone's guess. Furthermore, as a managers we are to protect the dignity and human rights of quite literally all people affected by our enterprises - an ambitious plan in light of how the oath also wants us to extend that idea to the future generations, and the advancement of their standards of living. Just how far down the line is not even specified. This is quite simply the most ridiculous extension of the stakeholder theory possible. How are we as managers to competently ascertain the interests of people who may not be born until after we die and who may not even ever be born?
And just what is meant by human rights? The idea of human rights has long ago taken on the character of a farce; apparently internet access is now a human right. Humans have rights, this not deniable, yet the codification of ever more wild, fanciful and ridiculous claims under the banner of human rights has had the effect of giving governments and special interests more planes on which to encroach upon our liberties. All rights carry obligations and if it is the right of someone to have internet access then someone has the obligation to provide it. Governments are usually very happy to step in and liberty loses out. Simply reading the UN Declaration of Human Rights must give one pause.
According to the original U.N. declaration of Human Rights all people are entitled to the “realization of the economic, social, and cultural rights indispensable for dignity and free development of personality,” just what this means is anyone’s guess and it is also anyone’s guess how we as managers are supposed to secure these to all people affected by our enterprise, even those yet to be born.
Everyone also“has a claim to just and favorable conditions of work,” yet by what standards is also anyone’s guess. The declaration does go on to claim that it is a human right to have holidays with pay, an indication of the detachment from reality that is the hallmark of this camp. When you vilify companies for not treating their employees in Bangladesh as well as those in Massachusetts you make all other businesses nervous about investing in developing countries. Yet human rights, as nice as they sound, cannot feed families. Nor should it be forgotten that it isn't high brow pronouncements of Western liberals that change the conditions of poor countries, it is investment and external contacts that do so. Pricing out millions in developing countries out of the workforce, denying them the benefits of external contacts to make Western liberals and naïve business school students feel better about their enlightened selves does little to help anyone but these elites.
A professor of mine once said that CSR is dangerous because once you open the door a bit to let the good guys in, the thugs get in as well. All objects are social objects, as Hayek once argued, which means they are what we perceive them to be. No oath can be ironclad in its defense against those who would wish to twist it to achieve their agendas. In other words even a sentence as clear as "I will not lie" is open to interpretation. The problem is that this oath is so open to interpretation, so vague, that not only does it leave the window open a crack, it leaves all windows and doors wide open, with a big welcome sign for some of the worst thugs imaginable to waltz right in.
I will be graduating in the summer of 2011, and I will not be taking this oath. I find the oath to be so vague and so open ended to be meaningless yet so far reaching as to be dangerous.A much better oath would have been the Columbia Business School oath which reads: “As a lifelong member of the Columbia Business School community, I adhere to the principles of truth, integrity, and respect. I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Clear, concise, and stripped of all the pseudo-intellectual b.s.
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