Harbus

Issue date: 4/7/08 Section: Features

Prof. Scott identifies one of the main challenges facing Harvard Business School as defining a meaningful sense of mission. The school's original mission, still in effect when he joined the faculty in 1962, was to teach students "how to earn a decent profit in a decent way"; this implied a faculty responsibility to lead in setting ethical standards that were compatible with managing a viable business. This was similar to some of the other good schools during that era. Prof. Scott believes that over the years the goal of business education has been transformed , as explained by Professor Rakesh Khurana in his recent book From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, from inculcating a professional ethic of service to societal stakeholders to one of maximizing shareholder value, i.e., to further enrich the top few percent of the population. Prof. Scott is hopeful that on this occasion of the centennial year that the HBS faculty will revisit these fundamental issues and consider ways to address this challenge of professional purpose.

As a message to students at HBS, Prof. Scott suggests that the class of 2008 consider the possibility that the US variant of capitalism is neither the only one nor necessarily the best. For example, the current crisis in financial markets seems very much "made in USA" and built from the notion that financial markets can and should exist largely independent from societal constraint or regulation even at the expense of periodic crises, and even though our financial system has shown a remarkable ability to privatize astonishing gains for a small number of insiders while spreading the costs of the crises on millions of shareholders, consumers and taxpayers. The US model may not be an obvious one for other counties to emulate.

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