Incoming MBA students at the University of Utah go through a unique initiation.
They paint houses, free, for the elderly and disabled.
The project is part of the U.'s "Business Challenge" program, something Jack Brittain, dean of the David Eccles School of Business at the U., calls a "way to help bring people to an awareness of their values."
An emphasis on values is part of the core curriculum in Utah's business schools, professors say, and provides a foundation for today's business education. The foundation stands in contrast to perceptions that the dot-com era is based on get-rich-quick schemes that explode one day and are who-knows-where tomorrow.
Corporate sponsors pay for the materials in the Business Challenge service project and often help with the labor. For the students, chances are better their future climb up the corporate ladder will remind them of the feelings they had while on a ladder with a paint can.
Business professors say a hopeful thing about the students coming into their programs is their enthusiasm for the kind of work they want to pursue — not the money they hope to make — though economic conditions most have lived through give them a limited experience on conditions they may see in the future.
"Most of our students have never seen a recession or remember one. They have lived in a business environment that has been pretty affluent, where markets have continued to go up," said Cal Boardman, professor of finance at the U. "At best, these students were 8 or 10 years old during the last major (stock market) crash, which was in October of '87."
Social responsibility develops as business students study corporate culture from both sides of the boardroom door.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman is known for saying that the only social responsibility business has is to increase its profits while obeying the rules of open and free competition.
If that sounds harsh, consider that Friedman's less-quoted clarification explains that social responsibility belongs to the people in business, not the business itself. Social responsibility also rests with the way a corporate officer handles his or her own money, not the money they control in trust for stockholders, Friedman says.
"They do talk about becoming philanthropists — that looks good to students — and I think that's great," said Neil Brady, a professor in BYU's Romney Institute of Public Management. "My interest (in teaching students) is more immediate than that. What do you do along the way? Who do you make your money off of? Are you going to be willing to make your money off teens in Indonesia making 25 cents an hour?"
The ethics classes Brady teaches graduate students aren't designed to turn greedy people into socially responsible ones, but rather to introduce thought patterns younger students may not have had on their own, before they enter a business world populated by both the charitable and the greedy.
In a way, classes on ethics and social thought encourage younger students to think more about money, and what they'll do with it when they have a good income.
Boardman teaches a class he developed six years ago that is required for freshmen as they enter the business school. The text, which Boardman co-authored with U. marketing professor Alan N. Sandomir, is a compilation of centuries worth of financial wisdom that includes Friedman and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. But it also includes the writings of Plato, Thoreau and Confucius.
"They read pieces we have gathered from across the centuries, from all around the world," Boardman said. "Then we ask the students to decide on their own what they think."
Some 1,500 go through Boardman's "Foundations of Business Thought" class each year. A few students enter with their minds made up about the role they intend to play in the business world, but most leave the class with a better idea of the things they want to accomplish with regard to the world around them, Boardman said.
"You cannot separate discussions of business from discussions of individual values and motives," he said.
Former U. student body president Jeff Casper went to work in Boston after graduating and got a full dose of business greed, he says. He is now on the business development team at Campus Pipeline in Salt Lake City and is active with the alumni association at the U.
Casper took the mandatory management class from Boardman's associate, Sandomir. "It was a phenomenal class," he said. "It challenged that moral code or fiber and challenges you to look at this issue."
Focusing on wealth too early brings one up short, Casper believes, but it is a condition that is alive among the student body.
"I don't think the pursuit of wealth ever proves to be a successful source of motivation, ever, especially in the dot-com world. The focus should be on how you create value in the marketplace," he said. "If you focus on that and how you really, truly do things better or innovate to do things more efficiently to improve the quality of life or improve a process, then the monetary value is the natural result."
The U.'s 10-year-old Business Challenge program was a hook that helped lure the business school dean to Utah from the University of Texas at Dallas last July.
"People easily get caught in the trap of saying 'that's the way things have always been done' and they don't think outside that context," Brittain said. "I want to have a couple more courses that help bring people to an awareness of their values. At the end of the day they have a better education because these elements are in there."