The Ethical Dimension
Next semester I will be teaching a course a course at the University of San Diego that is a required course for all MBA students. It is called Law, Policy and Ethics, but the course is really about the ethics of business. It has long been my objective to teach such a course, so I am working very hard to make it a good one and not just a collection of stories with a “What do you do?” Or “Can you believe that shit?” tone to them. I have copies of three previous course syllabi as guides now and I have started to put together a reading list so far with eight books I have found that I like on the subject (there are lots and lots on this topic). I have also started to think of the course format and how many guest lecturers I should have. Where my Advanced Corporate Finance course this semester benefitted tremendously from guest lecturers in all the different disciplines, I think a very different approach is called for in an ethics course.
To begin with, corporate finance is a subject matter where I believe 90% of the value of the information involves giving information and knowledge out to the students in a one-way manner. I feel that an ethics course requires a lot more back and forth and will be planning for a much more interactive approach. I want the students to engage in debate on these ethical issues and that means having people that are willing to take both sides. I have to think how best to do that and may find myself needing to outline the big debates ahead of time and randomly assigning people to one side or the other (allowing them the freedom to trade positions with other students but not to just decide they don’t want to take that side). I also want to see if I can figure out the generic types of ethical, policy and legal issues that I want to cover. I envision that as very doable, but it will require some research and thought. I’m getting an early enough jump on the course so I think I have enough time in the next three months to do this.
One of the things I am weighing is the extent to which I should focus on finance, my natural sweet spot and the arena in which all or most of my case examples can be easily derived. I have put into the bookstore for one required text so far (I do not like to burden my students with heavy book purchases). The book is by a colleague at Cornell for whom I have the greatest respect. It’s called Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street and it is a fabulous book on the conundrum that faces Wall Street professionals every day. What I have to determine is how much of that subject matter will be lost on non-financial types that are required to take the course. Let’s call that one of my first ethical issues with the design of the course. Do I make this easier for me to talk to or do I lighten the finance angle so that finance students don’t have a natural edge based on their presumably better contextual understanding of arbitrage.
That kind of balance ING act is why I have gathered the syllabi of previous versions of the course, specifically so that I do balance it all out. Most of the books I have downloaded for this topic are still heavily skewed towards financial subjects, just not so much as the Maureen O’Hara book I mentioned. I have a book by John Bogle, that sage of Vanguard and mutual fund investing. I have a book by Michael Sandel, the preeminent lecturers in this field who hails from Harvard Law School. I also have one by Robert Schiller of Yale, who has the distinction of being a Nobel Laureate in Economics. And then there is Judith Robin’s book Making Money Moral. She has the distinction of having been the first woman President of the University of Pennsylvania and the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, making her a force to be reckoned with in the field.
I have already lined up three guest speakers who come from very different backgrounds. One is my pal Steve who made his mark as an internet entrepreneur and spent his time building private tech companies in that space. He has the benefit of having started life as a seminary student so, as he said to me, he had to think about all the ethical issues long before he understood all the business overlay. The next is my old college and business friend Dale. She led a big corporate life at places like RCA, Hertz, and, most notably, The New York Stock Exchange, where she was head of Human Resources. She will bring a much needed female perspective, a corporate perspective, and an HR or employee perspective. She is a graduate of one of Cornell’s more unique colleges, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, one of the few of its kind in the world. The last speaker I have lined up is my pal Roger, who runs a family business that is in the construction and real estate business. His family has always been centered around Atlantic City, one of the more colorful cities on the Eastern Seaboard. He has the distinction of owning a toll bridge there, making one of a very few individuals that owns a piece of vital infrastructure that is usually held as a public utility asset. Roger is very Republican and I feel that the students will benefit greatly from hearing from someone with such different political and perhaps business perspectives than I know I have and I believe both Steve and Dale have.
All three of these guest speakers are my friends and yet they all come at life from very different angles. I think that is what drew me to them as speakers to this class. I feel that to promote a fulsome discussion about law, policy and/or ethics, one has to come at it from multiple perspectives and listen to all sides and all arguments. The three will not be speaking on the same day, so there won’t be the chance for open debate among them, but I am considering coming up with one general question to ask them all and then use their differing answers as the basis for a class wide debate on the topic. I am hoping to have a lively class and to give these students both lots to think about and lots to take away from the course that will make them more well-rounded businesspeople and individuals. To me, that is the value of a course about the ethical dimensions of life.