Teach values to your MBAs

"People have come to believe that business schools are harmful to society, fostering self-interested, unethical, and even illegal behavior by their graduates."

This from Joel Podolny, dean of Apple University in California and former dean of the Yale School of Management, writing in the June issue of Harvard Business Review. He's angry at the notable lack of conscience among big corporate MBAs for their central role in the collapse of Wall Street and the ongoing economic catastrophe in America. And he places the blame for their cavalier attitude at the feet of MBA schools, for their "inattention to [teaching] ethics and values-based leadership." He says that the biz schools give students the impression that values are mere details for their underlings to worry about — the MBA's role being only, once having attained a position of prominence, to set a vision, strategy and agenda.

Here at Instinct, we find this point of view fascinating, because the very creation of this firm was driven by a belief that old-school entrepreneurs — in contrast to the exploding number of professionally-schooled managers — instinctively take a values-based approach to building their Brands. In fact it is a sense of Instinctive Leadership that we endeavour to coach our clients.

Communicating values is fundamental to the entrepreneurial style because the entrepreneur must motivate her people with a strong sense of meaning and unified purpose — big time — if she intends to get her business out of the first quarter, let alone an address on Wall Street.

So values aren't just good for the conscience. They're good for business.

What does the Brand Coach coach?

If your Brand is largely run by business school graduates as opposed to street-taught entrepreneurs, you may not be using values to your full advantage. Assemble the thought leaders in your organization, from various ranks and roles, to establish a deeply-felt set of values through which all significant decisions will be filtered. Even better, establish an entire Brand Foundation, of which values are an important part.

Values help your people make decisions that are good for the Brand — and just plain good.

Click here to read an abbreviated version of the HBR article by Joel M. Podolny (The Buck Stops [and Starts] at Business School)