-----Beyond the _bottom line
Faced with the unpredictable world of global business, some MBA programs are searching for a new way to teach ethics. But the question remains, can it be done at all?

BY ALEC APPELBAUM | Last spring, at my graduation from the Yale School of Management, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange celebrated a rising world in which business eclipses politics as a venue for international understanding. "The world of DaimlerChrysler," he called it, and exhorted us to go out and meet its potential.

We made, I thought, a strange search party. True, we'd spent two years learning analytical and procedural rules for getting and spending, but the world? Social institutions, laws, decisions about the liberty of others? Surely a new world implied a new or expanded ethics, and we'd barely sniffed that. During the previous year, as economies from Thailand to Indonesia had collapsed, I'd heard that taxes were always hateful and that one could profitably choose currency trades based on which nations were crushing street riots. While largely mum on the ethics of those ideas, we'd hotly debated the relative virtues of the phone call and the personal meeting. All our models assumed a world in which everyone was party to our methods and understood our systems of measurement. With the ever-increasing speed of the global marketplace, that assumption has begun to worry professors, students and recent alumni from some of the country's top business schools.

Loudest among them is Aspen Institute's Judith Samuelson. She argues that since business now provides developing nations with funding sources that once came only from public agencies, businesspeople are increasingly playing the roles of cross-cultural liaisons and diplomats. Recently she launched a new research project to provide a business rationale for teaching humanitarian international ethics in business schools. If a recent informal survey of students and recent alumni offers any indication, Samuelson has her work cut out for her. Ethics, these students say, was consistently the biggest dud in their management training.

Most B-school ethics programs affirm American corporate law's emphasis on disclosure and consumer protection. Taught primarily through case studies, the heroes of these teaching tales uphold the law in courageous ways: Warren Buffett saved Salomon Brothers by being utterly frank with federal investigators. Johnson & Johnson earned loyal customers by recalling Tylenol after an off-site tampering. Such cases stoke modest debate, but they don't test these principles in regimes like Indonesia, where market opportunities exist but defined legal processes don't. With their studious inoffensiveness, business ethics often fade into the average MBA program. Two second-year students from Penn's Wharton contend that the required first-year ethics unit is the first they dumped when other homework piled up. Harvard, known for teaching only through narrative "cases," weaves ethics into leadership and strategy. Retired investment banker Rick Shreve runs abbreviated ethics modules at Yale and Dartmouth, surveying philosophers from Aristotle to Carol Gilligan. And Northwestern's Kellogg, reports a second-year student, forbids required ethics courses because their inclusion would suggest that MBAs lack ethics to begin with.

None of these programs approaches the ethical relationship between business and the global economy at a moment when international business is radically changing its dealings with developing countries. In the old days, corporations propped up sham governments -- the so-called "banana republics" -- where they found, exploited and exported a surfeit of natural resources. The incoming investors brought management with their money. Most business school case studies that treat the ethics of these forays suggest that self-serving humanitarianism makes everyone better off. A big drug company like Merck, by investing in unprofitable cures for river blindness in Africa, guaranteed itself long-term loyal customers in a marketplace bound for dramatic growth. The ethical lesson in this case and others like it says that vigorous capitalism honors American corporate law in regions where, because of despotism or chaos, one could get away with meaner deeds.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. New ethical problems in the global marketplace