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Here is a more informative article on the subject; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/books/review/golden-passport-duff-mcdonald.html https://www.nytimes.com/20

Here is a more informative article on the subject; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/books/review/golden-passport-duff-mcdonald.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/books/review/golden-passp... The critique of the moral underpinnings of the faculty, teachers and students seems legit and a a noticeable break off from earlier times, like when Harvard Business School (HBS) was founded. The critique in its essens is basically accusations of decadece. This "post-modern decadence" is in reality a much wider phenomenon that not only has affected the globalised business schools, but also the humanities and social sciences. If business schools have contributed to the weakening of business morals, then humanities and social sciences have weaken the social cohesion by pursuing cultural nihilism that rejects the national community and responsibility that for long was an essential part of citizenship. I hope these new realisations critiques will be used constructively.

Animats 9y ago
It goes further than that. There's a school of thought, stemming from an 1970 article by Milton Friedman, which claims that the only responsibility of corporate management is maximizing shareholder value. Forbes has a good analysis of that article, its influence, and aftermath.[1] The Harvard Business School creates leaders who believe that statement. This is a problem. A big problem. The Forbes article makes the argument that this approach is not only bad for society, but is responsible for the decline on return on capital since 1970. Despite the focus on the pursuit of shareholder value within each company, the overall result has been a decline in shareholder returns. Think about that for a moment. The only point of this form of capitalism is high shareholder returns, and it's not delivering even that. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/#921b02870e8a https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-ori...
- matt4077 9y ago
  That thinking seems to be much more prevalent among (for example) HN users than it actually is within the upper echelons of business. All those Fortune 500 CEOs probably know it's wrong. Otherwise they'd be thinking twice before implementing "Corporate Social Responsibility" programs.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    It's catnip to the intellectually lazy because it's completely unfalsifiable. Any action a company takes driven by anything but profit is dismissed as a PR move. Actions that aren't publicized but made it out anyway (since you wouldn't be discussing them otherwise) are dismissed as intentionally leaked. That isn't to say that a narrow view of a company's stakeholders isn't a problem, perhaps even a pervasive one. But most threads I've come across on HN et al on the topic have elevated it to the status of a religion, where people are utterly convinced that it's not possible for a company to be anything but blindly profit-driven.
    - baursak 9y ago
      You don't need to point to social responsibility programs to show that it's falsifiable. Simply point to CEOs outrageous self-serving compensation and other perks, and numerous conflicts between active investors and management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_fight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_fight is a well known thing.
      - wutbrodo 9y ago
        What are you talking about? I'm describing people who think that it's _literally impossible_ for a company as an entity to do anything but ultimately maximize shareholder value. Just because your rebuttal has the word "CEO" in it doesn't make it relevant to the conversation, and it certainly doesn't do anything to show that this phenomenon is universal (which, again, is the main and only thing we are talking about).
    - merpnderp 9y ago
      But can't it be argued that even social responsibility programs by companies are profit driven? Does it hurt or enhance Apple's image that they care about the disable, the environment or security against state actors? In the short term, likely not, but I weigh all of those things carefully when thinking about which phone I'm going to buy.
      - 9y ago
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  Friedman won the Nobel Prize for his work on the theory of the consumption function, and was well regarded for monetarism. It's a little bit of a stretch that a whole "school of thought" of corporate management stems from some guest op-ed he had in the NYTimes.
  - ryanobjc 9y ago
    The very first paragraph of the linked article notes exactly this: "No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders got going in a major way with an article by Milton Friedman in the New York Times on September 13, 1970."
    - ktRolster 9y ago
      I'd be willing to bet that the majority of business owners throughout history have had a similar thought. Not that there's any way to test that claim bet.
      - Animats 9y ago
        What's gone is corporate fear of labor. Of unions. Of strikes. Of your company being nationalized, as in the UK in the 1950s. Of communism winning economically, something business people worried about from 1930 to 1970. At last, oppression of workers is back! For about forty years, capitalism had ideological competition. There was a competitor, and capitalism had to deliver a better standard of living to compete. With the competition defeated, capitalism has a monopoly, and acts like a monopolist. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." - Orwell
        gameshot911 9y ago
        Interesting thought that an ideology itself could suffer from the bloat/excess inherent in any monopoly. Thanks for sharing.
      - wavefunction 9y ago
dmix 9y ago
Thanks, that's a much better article that focuses on the book. The linked Economist article is a bit strange, it starts with an interesting opening discussion on the books topic, then dismisses the entire thesis of the book in a sentence and gives a quickly put together comparison of HBS to a business, and some recommendations with little analysis to support the changes. ...They should have just focused on the book and critiquing that.
matt4077 9y ago
> cultural nihilism that rejects the national community It did reject that, after noticing that it's just fancy language for 'racism'.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  How did you come to that conclusion? Because it sounds like a strawman or throwing the baby out with the bathwater, depending on how you mean it.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  On paper, I'm a poster child for the above-described "cultural nihilism" with respect to national identity: my grandparents are Indian but spent a good chunk of their life in France, my parents moved to the US in their 20s 40+ years ago, and I was born and raised in an impossibly diverse environment, to the point that I was shocked when I came to college and discovered (e.g.) East Asians who only hung out with other East Asians or white people who only had white friends. The upshot of my background is that my family hasn't slotted easily into a given national culture for a few generations, and my personality developed around the concept of building one's identity around other (IMHO more rewarding) things. The accelerating trend towards universalist, fluid cultural identities built around mobility and big cities is practically tailor-made for a person like me. That being said, it's either very dishonest or extremely narrow-minded to claim that racism is the only reason someone could care about a cohesive national identity. Just because it doesn't suit my view of the world doesn't mean no one gets value out of it, and in fact I'm acutely aware of the extra work required to connect with someone without a shared cultural background (I just happen to think it's more than worth the benefits of such a philosophy). On top of that, this belief in a cohesive national identity is entirely possible without going anywhere near racism. "Blood n' soil" nationalism doesn't have much claim to relevance in a nation of immigrants like America, so our identity as a country is ideally built around people choosing to voluntarily join a society based on shared core values instead of the historically-common form of national identity built around ethnicity. It's possible to hold this view while having absolutely no opinion about someone's race: one could consider an ethnic nationalist (e.g.) Norwegian refusing to accept our values to be just as unfit as anyone else. You'll find that the world gets a lot more interesting if you don't desperately rush to pattern-match everything you hear into one of a few trite buckets that comprise an overly-simpleminded model of the world and its people.
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Ah, yes. Morals. "Took a class, big fun Modern Ethics 101 First day learned why Ethics really don't apply" - Steve Taylor

Animats 9y ago

It goes further than that. There's a school of thought, stemming from an 1970 article by Milton Friedman, which claims that the only responsibility of corporate management is maximizing shareholder value. Forbes has a good analysis of that article, its influence, and aftermath.[1] The Harvard Business School creates leaders who believe that statement. This is a problem. A big problem. The Forbes article makes the argument that this approach is not only bad for society, but is responsible for the decline on return on capital since 1970. Despite the focus on the pursuit of shareholder value within each company, the overall result has been a decline in shareholder returns. Think about that for a moment. The only point of this form of capitalism is high shareholder returns, and it's not delivering even that. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/#921b02870e8a https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-ori...

matt4077 9y ago
That thinking seems to be much more prevalent among (for example) HN users than it actually is within the upper echelons of business. All those Fortune 500 CEOs probably know it's wrong. Otherwise they'd be thinking twice before implementing "Corporate Social Responsibility" programs.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  It's catnip to the intellectually lazy because it's completely unfalsifiable. Any action a company takes driven by anything but profit is dismissed as a PR move. Actions that aren't publicized but made it out anyway (since you wouldn't be discussing them otherwise) are dismissed as intentionally leaked. That isn't to say that a narrow view of a company's stakeholders isn't a problem, perhaps even a pervasive one. But most threads I've come across on HN et al on the topic have elevated it to the status of a religion, where people are utterly convinced that it's not possible for a company to be anything but blindly profit-driven.
  - baursak 9y ago
    You don't need to point to social responsibility programs to show that it's falsifiable. Simply point to CEOs outrageous self-serving compensation and other perks, and numerous conflicts between active investors and management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_fight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_fight is a well known thing.
    - wutbrodo 9y ago
      What are you talking about? I'm describing people who think that it's _literally impossible_ for a company as an entity to do anything but ultimately maximize shareholder value. Just because your rebuttal has the word "CEO" in it doesn't make it relevant to the conversation, and it certainly doesn't do anything to show that this phenomenon is universal (which, again, is the main and only thing we are talking about).
  - merpnderp 9y ago
    But can't it be argued that even social responsibility programs by companies are profit driven? Does it hurt or enhance Apple's image that they care about the disable, the environment or security against state actors? In the short term, likely not, but I weigh all of those things carefully when thinking about which phone I'm going to buy.
    - 9y ago
lr4444lr 9y ago
Friedman won the Nobel Prize for his work on the theory of the consumption function, and was well regarded for monetarism. It's a little bit of a stretch that a whole "school of thought" of corporate management stems from some guest op-ed he had in the NYTimes.
- ryanobjc 9y ago
  The very first paragraph of the linked article notes exactly this: "No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders got going in a major way with an article by Milton Friedman in the New York Times on September 13, 1970."
  - ktRolster 9y ago
    I'd be willing to bet that the majority of business owners throughout history have had a similar thought. Not that there's any way to test that claim bet.
    - Animats 9y ago
      What's gone is corporate fear of labor. Of unions. Of strikes. Of your company being nationalized, as in the UK in the 1950s. Of communism winning economically, something business people worried about from 1930 to 1970. At last, oppression of workers is back! For about forty years, capitalism had ideological competition. There was a competitor, and capitalism had to deliver a better standard of living to compete. With the competition defeated, capitalism has a monopoly, and acts like a monopolist. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." - Orwell
      - gameshot911 9y ago
        Interesting thought that an ideology itself could suffer from the bloat/excess inherent in any monopoly. Thanks for sharing.
    - wavefunction 9y ago

dmix 9y ago

Thanks, that's a much better article that focuses on the book. The linked Economist article is a bit strange, it starts with an interesting opening discussion on the books topic, then dismisses the entire thesis of the book in a sentence and gives a quickly put together comparison of HBS to a business, and some recommendations with little analysis to support the changes. ...They should have just focused on the book and critiquing that.

matt4077 9y ago

> cultural nihilism that rejects the national community It did reject that, after noticing that it's just fancy language for 'racism'.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
How did you come to that conclusion? Because it sounds like a strawman or throwing the baby out with the bathwater, depending on how you mean it.
wutbrodo 9y ago
On paper, I'm a poster child for the above-described "cultural nihilism" with respect to national identity: my grandparents are Indian but spent a good chunk of their life in France, my parents moved to the US in their 20s 40+ years ago, and I was born and raised in an impossibly diverse environment, to the point that I was shocked when I came to college and discovered (e.g.) East Asians who only hung out with other East Asians or white people who only had white friends. The upshot of my background is that my family hasn't slotted easily into a given national culture for a few generations, and my personality developed around the concept of building one's identity around other (IMHO more rewarding) things. The accelerating trend towards universalist, fluid cultural identities built around mobility and big cities is practically tailor-made for a person like me. That being said, it's either very dishonest or extremely narrow-minded to claim that racism is the only reason someone could care about a cohesive national identity. Just because it doesn't suit my view of the world doesn't mean no one gets value out of it, and in fact I'm acutely aware of the extra work required to connect with someone without a shared cultural background (I just happen to think it's more than worth the benefits of such a philosophy). On top of that, this belief in a cohesive national identity is entirely possible without going anywhere near racism. "Blood n' soil" nationalism doesn't have much claim to relevance in a nation of immigrants like America, so our identity as a country is ideally built around people choosing to voluntarily join a society based on shared core values instead of the historically-common form of national identity built around ethnicity. It's possible to hold this view while having absolutely no opinion about someone's race: one could consider an ethnic nationalist (e.g.) Norwegian refusing to accept our values to be just as unfit as anyone else. You'll find that the world gets a lot more interesting if you don't desperately rush to pattern-match everything you hear into one of a few trite buckets that comprise an overly-simpleminded model of the world and its people.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

Ah, yes. Morals. "Took a class, big fun Modern Ethics 101 First day learned why Ethics really don't apply" - Steve Taylor