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Published: 4 February
'Business schools teach mantra of greed'
Business schools should teach global and social responsibility. If they had done so in 1989, the credit crunch might have been prevented, according to Professor Nigel Roome.
"If your parents only taught you to look after yourself, what would happen when you grew up? And what would be different if they had taught you to be more responsible, to care about others in society?" Nigel Roome, professor of corporate global responsibility and governance at TiasNimbas business school, prefers to answer by asking questions. Some are real, some rhetorical. His entire academic career he has been questioning the way universities teach business administration and economics. "When you say economics is preoccupied with efficiency, people take it as a personal insult." Asking difficult questions doesn't make one popular, Roome realizes. People hated Socrates for it.
In his inaugural lecture on Friday, January 29th, Roome explained how the current credit crisis can be traced to 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Some major events shaped our world, while others were largely ignored by business. In this year many top managers and bankers went to business schools. They were taught a mantra of the liberal market economy, in short, in Roome's words, 'compete and perform - richness will follow and society will benefit'. Roome knows an even shorter version: 'Greed is good.' Largely ignored was the instability of this system of greed, which recently became painfully clear.
In the same year, our view of the free market economy was boosted by the fall of the Iron Curtain. "Those on the capitalist side claimed, 'Our system has succeeded, so it must be right.' Those in Central and Eastern Europe, who had been fighting for social and economic freedom for over seventy years, now wanted to explore it the way Americans did. American business schools went there, and taught them cowboy capitalism."
One of the events of 1989 of little influence on the curriculum was the environmental disaster with oil tanker Exxon-Valdez. Global responsibility should have become part of the curriculum twenty years ago, Roome argues. But it didn't.
At this moment, the greed-mantra still seems to reign. Roome expects it to contribute to other crises in the next twenty years, linked to economics, shortages of resources and climate change, possibly leading to mass migration.
Some of his colleagues in Tilburg are paying attention to these issues, Roome believes. "This university is behind the leading edge, but it's not in the back of the line", says Roome. "There's lots of ambition to be a top school, but there is a need to try and see tomorrow's issues and to begin to address them today." Roome has a suggestion or two.
[Marten van de Wier]
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