During the last class, Professor Wildon strutted about the room, soliciting comments on the grueling negotiating experience and fishing for testimonials on his masterful course method. After hearing several obsequious observations from my classmates I raised a hand to speak. "Our team wasted 20 hours of valuable time while our counterparts admitted falsely maintaining that they could produce conflicting data," I said. "If our assignment was to simulate real-time collective bargaining practice, then the "City" team should be sanctioned for bargaining "in bad faith."
The response was a sudden, absolute silence, as if I had spoken a racial epithet or made a crude remark about a physically impaired classmate. Wildon's grunted response was unintelligible. No one challenged my statement. During Professor Wildon's long silence I realized that he had no intention of addressing to my comment; that he had seen this phenomenon before, and that he fully expected students to behave unethically to procure a better grade.
In a devastating flash of insight, I saw that I was the only person in the room who was troubled by this win-at-any-cost culture. Patently unethical behavior, which would have resulted in ostracism by my MHA colleagues, was-in this highly-ranked MBA Graduate Business School culture-an accepted technique, one that could even be rewarded by better grades and thus better job placements.
In that moment of painful epiphany and reluctant comprehension I saw that collective cheating, i.e., a team negotiating in bad faith, was simply a technique to win higher grades (today) in class, and perhaps greater compensation or recognition (tomorrow) in the corporate marketplace. Professor Wildon, still ignoring my comment, abruptly dismissed the class: "Well, I guess that's all for this quarter. Have a good Winter Break."
Many of those MBA students, then mostly in their '20s, are today among the region's and the nation's senior business leaders. And while the academic literature indicates that CEOs are not exclusively recruited from MBA backgrounds, there is no question in my mind that the examples of business scandals enumerated above are endemic to today's corporate culture and in no way represent aberrant behavior.
In this era of bail-out and rescue planning, Caveat Emptor, Congress!
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