Christmas Thoughts on Business Education

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop in the water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol¹

How did we get to this dark place in business today? To this place of colossal accounting scandal (e.g., Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco, Global Crossing, Arthur Andersen); stock and hedge fund manipulation (e.g., Bearing Point, ImClone); looting of pension funds; after-hours trading by financial services companies; crass exploitation of vanity (a $6 billion per year cosmetic industry) and vice (a $15 billion per year pornography industry); a coarse business culture of CEO celebrity, materialism, and style over substance; backdated stock options; and obscene levels of executive pay and privilege? How did we get to this place of suspicion and broken trust in the business profession? When a recent Gallup Poll asked Americans to rank the honesty and ethics of twenty-three professions, they ranked the business professions in the bottom third, giving each more negative than positive scores. Business executives ranked fifteenth, stockbrokers ranked seventeenth, insurance salesmen ranked twentieth, HMO managers ranked twenty-first, advertising practitioners ranked twenty-second, and car salesmen ranked last at twenty-third.²

It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. A more illuminating way to say the same thing is to note, with C. S. Lewis, that secondary goods pursued as if they are the primary good become no goods at all.³ In the hell-bound lament of the ghost of Jacob Marley above—the lament of putting the good of a business trade ahead of the good of mankind—Charles Dickens telegraphs the moral of his nineteenth-century classic A Christmas Carol. It is a moral for business education today.

This article is about the goods pursued in schools of business administration, in the United States especially but all around the world as well. I argue that, without meaning to, business schools convey goods that work against the profession they serve. By putting secondary goods of the trade—in particular, the goods of the corporation, its shareholders, and managers themselves—before the primary good of business, they undermine all good and invite the hell of Marley’s ghost: “The whole time . . . no rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse” (23). Put plainly, if somewhat harshly, I suggest that business schools today offer students what amounts to a “bill of goods.” And put plainly, if somewhat hopefully, I suggest, with Dickens, that business schools can and must do better.

But I am getting ahead of the story. This article unfolds as follows. I begin with the primary good of business, with the good that brings order to the many and varied secondary goods of business practice. This good, I find, is nothing other than the supreme good of a person—the summum bonum. This is the good of one’s creative being; what the Catholic Church and the other great faith traditions of the world think of as his or her being in God. With Dickens, and with Michael Novak and Dennis Bakke today, I see that business should and can be a sacred and redeeming calling, a “vocation” in God. ⁴ In view of this summum bonum, I then examine the goods that business schools today encourage in students. I find that while these goods have their place, when taken alone, apart from the summum bonum, they lead away from the true good of a person and the true good of business. I close the article with a few Christmas thoughts about how business schools might answer the calling of business life and thereby restore dignity to the people and organizations they serve.

The Summum Bonum

The good of business education is the good of humankind. Business does not exist apart from human life, but ranks among...