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WHITE:
I know that governance is critically important, but at the end of the
day, it’s the stock price that matters. And so the tremendous pressure
that exists for corporations to deliver on earnings, to meet the
expectations of Wall Street, has forced a lot of business leaders to
become shor tsighted. I know in business school we talk about strategy
and how critically important that is. However, every quarter the CEO
has to go to the Street and have a conversation, and if you do not
deliver on the quarterly earnings and manage the Street’s expectations,
that tends to drive some behaviors that I dare say are contrary to some
of what Neville says we need to do.
LORD:
It has to with what our boards and our enterprises define as fiduciary
responsibility. Is it a set of rewards, a set of benchmarks focused on
short-term goals, or is fiduciary responsibility also tied to the
long-term stability and sustainability of the company? We’re going to
have to answer
these big questions, because if we don’t someone else will, and I promise you those answers will not be business oriented.
FORQUER:
What are the implications of all we’ve been talking about for business
schools – both the existing content vehicles and the experiences that
students have as well?
WHITE:
As far as the experience is concerned, one of the things I think that
can be improved is forcing the students to apply what they learn back
at work. And when I say forcing, I mean give them a grade on real
things that are going on at the office. Teachers have to teach a
semester, nurses have to work in a hospital, why not have business
students be required to work in a corporation?
HUSS:
I absolutely agree. There was an article written about the future of
business education, and it said that we should not only be training
financial engineers and management technicians, for example, but we
also have to form “global citizens.” There is much, much more that we
can do in business schools to connect the business disciplines we are
teaching you to what is happening in business. Maybe when we have an
international experience we visit companies and at the same time do a
community project where they see that these are the challenges my
fellow world citizens are facing not only in running their businesses
but in living their lives.
LORD:
On that point I had the privilege of going with the EMBAs on their trip
to Shanghai and Tokyo. If I were to do content analysis of the
presentations by company executives, a good part of their presentations
was about contextual issues. Their constraints to growth,
sustainability, and profitability are largely contextual. They know how
to make widgets. But the issues that keep them awake at night are
contextual.
PETERSON:
I’m part of an organization and we were given a test to go out in the
community and help a nonprofit, so the thought might be that you
solicit nonprofit organizations to have a team of students help them
for a term on some project that they have. You could now tailor some of
your global citizenship thinking to what they are experiencing.
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