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| As B-schools scramble
to ensure that their curricula devote adequate credits to courses
on ethics, recruiters are pencilling in once-abhorred adjectives
such as plain, solid, and conservative into their desired-employee
profiles. |
There's
safety in mediocrity-that's the message industry seems to have derived
from capitalism's crises this past year. Charisma, intelligence,
aggression, and oodles of street-smarts are characteristics common
to many of the offenders in the news, or out of it: from Salomon
Smith Barney's star analyst Jack Grubman who played a role in creating
the WorldCom bubble to Andersen partner David Duncan, the lead auditor
on the Enron account, to Andrew S. Fastow, the said power company's
CFO, to Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget who privately rubbished
the internet stocks he publicly rated investment-worthy.
And as B-schools in the US and Europe, and
closer home in India scramble to ensure that their curricula devote
adequate credits to courses on ethics, recruiters are pencilling
in once-abhorred adjectives such as plain, solid, steady, and conservative
into their desired-employee profiles. In the near-term, that's an
opportunity of sorts for second-rung B-schools with visions of greatness.
''Our students may not be as intelligent as the ones who get into
IIM, Ahmedabad,'' the dean of an also-in-the-running Indian B-school
once admitted to me, "but recruiters prefer them for some positions
because they are far more stable.'' And less expensive to boot.
B-school may be the wrong place to instruct people on business ethics.
Most people who walk through the doors of a B-school have worked
for some time-even in straight-out-of-college-and-straight-into-B-school
India where half the students who enroll in the better B-schools
boast work experience of some form on their CVs-and they arrive
with their psyche fully formed, with as much sense of right and
wrong that their parents, schools, and immediate environment have
bestowed on them. No course can change that. Imagine B-schools offering
a course titled Sinistral 101 with the objective of ensuring that
anyone who enrolls for it can write left-handed in three months.
Apart from serving as Unique Selling Propositions for schools that
aren't there yet-and there's no doubt in my mind that these schools
will exploit the corporate world's prevailing obsession with ordariness
to their advantage-such courses achieve little.
There's more to the born-again fascination
with qualities such as plain, solid, steady, and conservative than
chief executives and heads of Human Resources who chorus about ''people''
being their ''biggest strength'', and the importance of investing
in ''knowledge workers'' will admit. This is the insidious assumption
that intelligence and crookedness, ambitiousness and avarice, and
eloquence and glibness are somehow linked. Faced with evidence that
points to the superior intelligence of corporate delinquents, some
companies have chosen to nip the problem at the shoot.
A healthy dash of orthodoxy will certainly
do Big Business a world of good, but recruiters could find their
strategies coming back to haunt them with the next upturn in the
economy. The characteristics they are currently eschewing are the
very same qualities that make stocks rise, catalyse the creation
of new business model, encourage the discovery of new product- and
service-offerings and, generally, make the world go round. Shorn
of them, all business will become an exercise in incrementalism.
As a professional hack, I can only tell you that things, then, could
become very very boring.
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