FOR GOODNESS’

On the face of it, not much has changed in corporate behaviour since business schools began putting all their educational eggs in the ethics basket. Why not?

Are business schools failing in their duty to teach new generations of business people right from wrong? Can ethics in fact be taught? In the 10 years since they received a public roasting for churning out many of the corrupt business leaders who, by omission or commission, caused the global financial crash, business schools have put greater resources into imbuing students with the correct moral and ethical standards.

It started out with standalone ethics courses, in the hope that the occasional droning lecture would do the trick. Then came the realisation that ethical behaviour, or the lack of it, affects every corner of business. So now it is taught within other subjects. Ethics and governance, schools boast, is at the heart of all they teach.

But what has been the impact of this moral crusade? On the face of it, not much. Globally, corrupt business practices flourish as they always have. In SA, Steinhoff, KPMG, Mckinsey, Eskom, SAP, Denel and Nkonki are among the firms caught in recent illicit behaviour. Corporate giants like Murray & Roberts, Group Five, Aveng, Tiger Brands, Premier, Pioneer, PPC, Lafarge and many leading media houses are among scores of companies fingered in cartel investigations.

And let’s not even start on the looting taking place daily within government and state-owned enterprises, which President Cyril Ramaphosa is committed to ending. The Gupta link may have increased the scale of corruption under Jacob Zuma, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it wasn’t happening already.

Most distressing, in some eyes, has been the growing proof of fraud perpetrated by a section of the Stellenbosch business establishment that previously surrounded itself in a cloak of moral rectitude. Nelson Mandela University Business School director Randall Jonas observes: “The Stellenbosch economic giants are no longer held in the same high regard.”

Welcome to Skelmbosch.

Rightly or wrongly, MBA graduates have long been tainted by a “me-first” image.

A few years ago, a university study in the US found that convicts and MBA students share similar ethical standards. Regenesys Business School founder Marko Saravanja says: “Knowledge makes them feel powerful. But, on its own, knowledge is shallow. They become less humble and compassionate.”

So where is ethics teaching going wrong? Or is it? Nicola Kleyn, dean of the Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs), reckons it takes up to 10 years for the impact of new MBAS to be felt in the marketplace. So perhaps we should be patient.

Helena van Zyl, director of the University of the Free State Business School, doesn’t think waiting will make much difference. Unless students have decent standards to begin with, the most you can hope is that they will understand the ethical principles.

Wits Business School (WBS) academic Terri Carmichael agrees. “It’s not about teaching but about learning,” she says. “Knowledge is one thing, applying it is something quite different.

Only if the environment supports the principles with unshakeable consequences will people respond properly. Otherwise the best you can hope for is that people know what they are doing is wrong.”

Sometimes they don’t. Carmichael’s WBS colleague, Anthony Stacey, who lectures on the ethics of academic research, uses the example of attitudes to plagiarism. It used to be simple, he says: if you used someone else’s ideas without acknowledgment, you were a plagiarist. But what if that idea has already been “borrowed” and shared all over social media? At what point does it become common knowledge and therefore fair game for everyone?

“People who repost something on Facebook think of it as their own,” says Stacey. “I don’t think it’s malicious, they just don’t see it as wrong.”

Most students starting out at business schools are in their late 20s. Family and other influences have already established underlying moral codes, which get coloured by business experience. Differences may be accentuated by cultural bias.

As Jonas points out, one culture’s accepted behaviour is another’s no-no. “Do you show