The MBA Oath: Setting a Higher Standard for Business Leaders - Hardcover

Max Anderson and Peter Escher, two recent graduates of Harvard Business School, worked with a team of MBA students to found the MBA Oath in May 2009 and garnered worldwide attention for their mission to establish an official code of business ethics. Anderson currently serves as chairman of the MBA Oath organization and lives in New York City with his wife and daughter. Escher is a board member and serves as its founding executive director.

"The MBA Oath...turns out to be a thoughtful response to the [recent] situation in which thousands of MBA students found themselves.... A generation of students went to business school to learn about business and found themselves portrayed as villains because of the misdeeds of their predecessors.... The authors draw on cases taught to Harvard MBA students to expand their view of business ethics from the narrowly legal to a wider vision of responsibility. They write meditatively about everything from ambition to leadership."
-The Financial Times

"Lawyers have their oath of attorney, and doctors have that Hippocratic one, but it struck Max Anderson. . . . that MBAs have nothing. And so he and several of his classmates created the MBA oath, a promise to 'act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.' . . . These Harvard students have started an important discussion about doing the right thing in business, which is never a bad conversation to have."
-Fast Company

"In the post-Enron and post-Madoff era, the issue of ethics and corporate social responsibility has taken on greater urgency among students about to graduate. While this might easily be dismissed as a passing fancy-or simply a defensive reaction to the current business environment-business school professors say that is not the case. . . . Those graduating today, they say, are far more concerned about how corporations affect the community, the lives of its workers, and the environment."
-Leslie Wayne, The New York Times