Character as the educational foundation for future business leaders

Programs to help students discern their vocation or their call gain in importance in higher education.

According to a 2019 BATES / GALLUP survey, 80% of university graduates want a sense of work. In addition, a survey in 2023 revealed that 50% of generation Z and millennium employees in the United Kingdom and the United States resigned from a job because the values of the company did not line up with theirs.

These feelings are also found in students of business schools today, because generation Z requires that the content of the courses reflect changes in society, diversity and inclusion to sustainability and poverty. According to the Financial Times, “there may never have been a more demanding cohort”.

And yet, business schools have been slower than other schools to answer, leading to calls from the transformation of commercial education to demolition.

What are the business schools created?

Historically, studies have shown that candidates for business schools have obtained a higher score than their peers on the traits of “black triad” of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiaveanism. These features can manifest themselves in a cunning tendency, intrigue and, sometimes, to unscrupulous behavior.

During their study program, other studies have shown that business school environments can amplify these pre -existing trends while improving the concern of what others think of it.

And these trends stick after obtaining the diploma. A study examined 9,900 American companies listed publicly and separated the sample by those led by managers who have gone to the business school and to those whose managers have not done so. Although they found no discernible difference in sales or profits between the two samples, they found that work wages were reduced by 6% over five years in companies managed by managers who went to business school, while managers without trade diploma shared their profits with their workers. The study concludes that this is the result “of the practices and values acquired in commercial education”.

But there are signs that it can change.

Questioning value

Today, many question the value of MBA.

Those who decided that this was worth the high cost complained of its lack of rigor, relevance and critical thinking or to use it simply for access to networks for the improvement of wages, the treatment of class learning as less than attending recruitment events and social activities.

In superimposed on this uncertain situation, generative artificial intelligence fundamentally modifies the landscape of education, threatening future career prospects and short-circuiting the student’s education by doing their research and writing for them.

This is worrying because of the disproportionate role that business leaders play in today’s society: allocating capital, developing and deploying new technologies and influencing political and social debates.

Sometimes this role is positive, but not always. Mistrust follows this uncertainty.

Only 16% of Americans had a “big deal” or “many” of confidence in companies, while 51% of Americans between 18 and 29 have a low vision of capitalism.

Faced with this reality, commercial educators are starting to re -examine the way of feeding business leaders who consider companies not only as a means of earning money but also as a vehicle in service to the company.

Supporters such as Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College; Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University; Harold Shapiro, former president of the Princeton University; And Anthony Kronman, former dean of the Yale Law School, describe this effort as a return to the original objective of a university education.

No ethics, but character training

Business schools have often included ethics courses in their study program, often with limited success. What some schools are experimenting with is character training.

In the context of this experiment is the development of a coherent moral culture which is in the course program but also in cocotrical programming, cultural events, seminars and independent studies that shape the visions of the student world; selection, socialization, training and reward systems for students, staff and teachers; and other aspects that shape students’ training.

Bill Damon de Stanford, one of the main academics to help students develop a sense of objective in life, describes a revised role for teachers in this effort, one of the creation of fertile conditions for students to find their own meaning and an objective.

I use this approach in my course on discernment of vocation in business, going from a more traditional academic style to the one that is more developmental.

It is a relational teaching that artificial intelligence cannot do. This implies bringing the whole person into the education process, inspiring both hearts and engaging leaders to train competent leaders who have character, judgment and wisdom.

It allows an examination of the how and why of business, putting students to consider the type of business manager they aspire to be and what type of inheritance they wish to establish.

He would mark a return to the initial objective of the first business schools, which, as Rakesh Khurana, professor of sociology at Harvard calls him, in his book “From Higher Assing to Hirgy Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Notfilled Promed of Management that the profession”, was to the company of training. “”

Making commercial education

The good news is that there are emerging examples that seek to create this type of program through centers such as the Institute for Social concerns of the University of Notre-Dame and the Center for Publicy Work and the courses of the University of Stanford and the management of the University of Michigan as a figure.

These are just a few examples of an increasing movement. Thus, the construction blocks are there to shoot. The students’ demand is waiting to be satisfied. All that is necessary is that more business schools respond.

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