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As someone who has hired literally dozens of MBAs from first tier schools over the years, I was puzzled by the buzz around the Harvard Business School MBA ethics oath.  It was always my impression that a moral compass came as a standard feature on a base model MBA.  Now, it seems, it's being offered as an optional upgrade.
 But given its availability, going forward no one would hire an MBA who hadn't taken the oath, right?  I don't think so.  My last experience with MBAs under extreme temptation leads me to conclude that such an oath would actually do more harm than good because it trivializes the issue of business ethics.  Here's why.
At Scient - the biggest consultancy of the dotcom era - I managed a couple of dozen MBAs from Harvard, Penn, INSEAD, Stanford and Chicago - some freshly minted, and some with a few years of work experience. These fine and smart people were client engagement managers and strategy advisors, working with aggressive startups heavily funded by first tier venture capital.  The pressure to succeed was enormous because the upside for the winners was huge.  The result was a pressure-cooker environment that tested the moral mettle of everyone involved.  If you were in the game then, you know exactly what I mean.  If you weren't, go back and have a look at the WSJ annual executive compensation summary for 1999 to get a sense of the wealth that was being created at that moment.
I learned one thing very quickly as I dealt with the questions and concerns that my engagement managers had about their clients - black and white conceptions of ethics (e.g. don't lie, steal or cheat) were useless for real-world moral guidance. To the particular surprise of the newly-minted MBAs, the potential for ethical compromise was never intentional, sudden and clear, but reactionary, incremental and hidden in numbers and legalese.   There were few grand conspiracies to cheat or Iago-like evil geniuses. Ethical compromise didn't involve the business equivalent of vast killing fields, but a complicated, expedient series of what the playwright Jules Feiffer characterized as "little murders".   Â
 This experience leads me to suggest that oaths like the one under discussion (or mottos like Google's "don't be evil") trivialize the ethics issues that businesspeople face in the real world, and give students, employees and employers a naive sense of moral confidence. It does everyone a disservice to imply that agreeing to a few moral platitudes somehow equips people to deal with the insidious temptations that present themselves in the business world.
Like it or not, independent, experienced oversight - be it at the management, board or regulatory agency level - is really the only way to assure ethical behavior in business. Â