[lbo-talk] What They Teach You at Harvard Business School

[SA]

Dennis Claxton wrote:
>  More conclusively, it encourages its little alumni to major in 
> hypocrisy. You go there for one simple reason: to make shedloads of 
> money. Fine, so it's no crime in itself to want to be absurdly and 
> pointlessly rich, although it's certainly no virtue. What sticks in 
> the gullet is graduates' self-flattering delusion that they're on some 
> kind of crusade, their "very American" insistence, as Delves Broughton 
> puts it, on being not only "the most powerful, the richest and most 
> successful", but also "the most morally good". At the same time as 
> learning how to manipulate billions in order to profit, say, from 
> ordinary people's fretful indebtedness during a recession, you can 
> believe that you are a philanthropic leader of men. Yet these are 
> people whose answer to their own question, "How will I know how much 
> is enough?" is, "When you've got your own jet." Any notion that such 
> jet-setting plutocrats are truly concerned about the rest of us, or 
> the planet, or the future, is laughable. . .
>
> These money-loving graduates must nurture "heightened self-awareness" 
> and "a strong moral compass", they must "foster integrity strategies", 
> acquire "leadership and values". But why the hell would the rest of us 
> want to be led by these spreadsheet-reading, PowerPoint-presenting 
> swots who've devoted the best years of their lives simply to making 
> moolah?

If I were a billionaire newspaper mogul or think-tank impresario, I 
would order some bright young leftist to do a research project and write 
up the results: Identify several dozen business barons disgraced by 
egregious acts of fraud, theft, gross negligence, etc., and then go back 
and gather all their pious pre-downfall corporate-speak quotes about 
integrity, service and giving back to the community. It would be a handy 
compendium to have at one's elbow.

SA