In 2008 the world lost hundreds of billions of dollars in financial assets, an amount equal to the annual total of worldwide gross domestic product. The losses have been devastating: lost jobs, lost pensions, lost trust in Wall Street. In the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, many have found a scapegoat: MBAs.

 Although no single group can be blamed for the economic meltdown, a number of high-profile MBAs have been implicated. Many have speculated that MBA programmes are at best useless and at worst dangerous. As I graduated from Harvard Business School this month, I thought of the writer who opined that the letters “MBA” on degrees such as mine were “scarlet letters of shame”.

Placing the entire blame for the financial collapse on MBA graduates is a bridge too far. But holding them blameless is a bridge too short. If two years of full-time professional training doesn’t mean that MBAs will be held to higher standards of ethics and performance, what good is the degree? At this historical moment, either MBAs will accept the responsibility of changing, or the degree’s prestige will collapse as heavily as the stock market did.

I am one of more than 1,100 MBA graduates, representing more than 140 business schools worldwide who have taken the “MBA oath”, a “Hippocratic oath” for business. I worked alongside a group of 30 MBA students to write the oath, basing our text on the work of two Harvard professors, Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana. The oath begins with the premise that the purpose of a manager is “to serve the greater good by bringing together people and resources to create valuable goods and services for society”. It incorporates eight specific pledges including the duty to act with “utmost integrity” and being held “accountable to my peers”.

Two pledges have created the most debate. The first requires safeguarding “the interests of my share- holders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate”. By its express terms the oath requires protecting the interests of shareholders, but it also requires consideration of the interests of a broader group of stakeholders. The financial collapse has taught us that by ignoring the interests of a broader group of stakeholders, we in fact compromised and in some instances destroyed the interests of our shareholders.  

The second controversial promise is to “manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behaviour that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the society it serves”. Although we recognise that the pursuit of self-interest is at the core of the capitalist economic engine, we submit that unbridled greed has proved to have catastrophic consequences.

We wish to promote accountability and responsibility for MBAs who take the oath and encourage the entire MBA community to set higher ethical standards, regardless of whether they take the oath. When MBA programmes were first created a century ago they were founded on the premise that management should be a profession. We hope that the oath is a step towards realising that founding mission.

We have begun the process of creating MBA oath chapters on the world’s top business school campuses. We hope one day every graduating MBA will take this oath just as physicians take the Hippocratic oath. The history of the Hippocratic oath suggests this idea may not be so far-fetched. We think of the oath as a sacred medical creed, created in the era of Hippocrates. In fact, until the middle of the past century only a minority of physicians took the oath. Only after the second world war and the discovery of gruesome experiments conducted in the name of “medicine” did medical schools widely adopt it.

The world has now discovered gruesome experiments conducted in the name of business. The necessity to adopt the MBA oath cannot be more obvious. The circumstances are exigent. Time is of the essence.