business ethics – Smurfit MBA Blog

I find myself in week four of the second semester of my 1-year full-time MBA. The weeks just fly by and one week does not resemble the next. With three electives on top of my core modules, I run from one thing to the next: I jump on a video conference with our Yale counterparts to manage a virtual plant as part of our Supply Chain module; try to negotiate a good deal to buy a new biotech manufacturing site in my negotiations elective; am torn between Friedman and Mackey on the purpose of business in my Business Ethics class; come up with a business model for a new venture in Entrepreneurship; juggle fixed, variable, direct and indirect costs in Management Accounting; create a ‘Elena 2030’ vision with my executive coach; take a breath and literally run to the next thing.

And yet, there is a comforting constant in the hectic MBA week. Every day, at 1.30pm on the dot, the door to the MBA room opens and ten very excited (mostly male) MBA students cannot wait for the highlight of their day: the sandwich and soup deal from the Deli around the corner. I have to admit that I do sometimes join in because you cannot beat a good sandwich for lunch – may my sourdough-loving German ancestors forgive me. The comforting thing about it is, however, not so much the sandwich itself (and the obligatory basil and tomato soup), it is the fact that no matter if you buy a sandwich, bring your own lunch or just enjoy a coffee after eating in the cafeteria – every day you get to spend a peaceful 30 minutes in the MBA room with a mix of interesting, genuinely nice people who always have a good story to tell.

An MBA is an intense experience and it is a tough and sometimes scary decision to leave a great job to go back to being a full-time student for a year. Building on what Cathal wrote in his blog entry below (check it out, well worth reading!), what makes this year a lot easier and very enjoyable is the people you get to spend it with. In Germany we say ‘geteilte Freude ist doppelte Freude, geteilter Schmerz ist halber Schmerz’, which translates to ‘shared joy is double joy, shared sorrow is halved sorrow’. This definitely applies to an MBA. To make it a little less dramatic, let’s replace sorrow with stress. Sharing this experience with a great group of people is definitely double the fun and half the stress!

Elena Nock ~ Full-Time MBA

It’s strange, even unnerving, to hear a CEO speak about society, about community, about the need to do not just what is profitable, but what is right. Last week our EMBA class heard from Niall Fitzgerald, former CEO of Unilever and corporate success par excellence, on how modern capitalism was failing because of a fundamental lack of values – and perhaps even a lack of morals.

The title of his address, “You Can’t Have Successful Business in a Broken Society,” invited a certain level of skepticism among some of my more cynical classmates. I think it’s fair to say that most of us would see a certain degree of truth in the tired cliché, “nice guys finish last,” and that few would feel the modern corporate environment is a warm, fuzzy place where everyone just tries to be friendly and get along. But I would be confident that Mr. Fitzgerald’s central point reached even my most jaded colleagues – it’s not a question of whether businesses should be more ethical, but that they must be more ethical in order to survive.

In this globalised world, short term approaches to growing profits, using resources or managing workers will simply no longer work, we were told. Gouging customers will merely open opportunities to more reasonable competitors. Today’s factory workers in low-cost economies are also the consumer class of tomorrow’s growth markets. And as for reckless exploitation of the environment – if China’s population were to reach a Western standard of living at today’s rate of resource usage, we will need nine more Earths to meet this demand. Clearly, if a business (never mind humanity) is to survive in the 21st Century, a long-term approach is needed.

Having listened to Mr. Fitzgerald’s address, I don’t think any of my classmates can now doubt his central point. If anything, I think, his cornerstone argument in favour of a long-term, responsible approach to the challenges of the modern era needs to be widened beyond business, to encompass society as a whole. After all, during the boom period in Ireland until 2007, the very banks who are now pilloried for being reckless were being criticised for not giving out enough mortgages. Undoubtedly, business in the West needs to take a good long look at itself. But the same might be said of society in general.

Eoin McDonnell

EMBA 2015

Ireland

Tag: business ethics

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