Directions for Developing Inspired Business Leaders:
Lessons from the Decision Sciences
Submission Track: Teaching
Coral R. Snodgrass
Department of Management & Marketing
Canisius College
2001 Main Street
Buffalo, NY
14208
tel: 716-888-2607
fax: 716-888-3215
email: snodgras@canisius.edu
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Directions for Developing Inspired Business Leaders:
Lessons from the Decision Sciences
Abstract
The theme of this year’s conference is “Developing Inspired Business Leaders for the
Common Good”. This theme was chosen presumably because at present our Jesuit
Business Schools are not developing inspired business leaders for the common good.
This paper presents a model for teaching students about organizational decision making
that can help them to become better business leaders. This model was developed
applying the same logic that was used to change our business curricula to incorporate
concepts such as quality management and security.
Introduction
The need for a fresh approach to teaching “inspired business leadership” is premised on
the assumption that it is the sometimes sorry state of affairs in the business world that
leads to this concern about a lack of inspired leaders. We are almost daily presented with
stories about corporate leaders who have failed in their responsibilities to the various
stakeholders of the organization – employees, retirees, stockholders, the list goes on.
This is not unlike the lament we heard 30 years ago when corporate America was being
berated for the lack of quality in its products and processes. At that time, business
researchers, educators and practitioners turned their attention to finding ways to
incorporate considerations of quality control throughout the corporation. It required the
development of an entirely new way to think about the design and delivery of goods and
services. The new way of thinking not only changed the way corporate America
approached quality, it changed the way we taught our students. And it has worked. The
students we graduate today understand that consideration of quality is a given. At
present, business curricula are being modified to include consideration for security in
management decision making. We need a new teaching approach that assures that for the
students we graduate in the future consideration of the common good is a given.
This paper presents one teaching model to accomplish this. This approach provides a
method for deconstructing, examining and critiquing the values and assumptions that
underlie managerial decision making. We use the literature on decision making,
management control systems and managerial deviance to develop this teaching model.
The literature on decision making shows how individual decision processes can be
understood. The literature on management control systems shows the relationship
between individual decision making and corporate decision processes. The literature on
deviant behavior allows us to begin to describe “bad” managers – presumably the type of
managers we do not want our students to become.
The teaching model utilizes this decision making context to deconstruct vignettes of
“deviant” managerial decision making developed from corporate emails and memos.
These can be used to explore with our students the organizational context that allows
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certain decisions to be made and the behavior of the individual managers who make
them. This leads to a discussion of what needs to change in order to allow “good”
managerial decisions to be made – presumably those that provide for “the common
good”.
Inspired Business Leadership
In order to begin the consideration of methods for incorporating different emphases into a
business curriculum, it is necessary to define the outcome we are trying to achieve. We
start with a consideration of the question “What is inspired business leadership?” For
purposes of this discussion, we define “inspired business leaders” as those managers who
“demonstrate good character in their decision making”. This definition builds on the
work of Hartmann (2006) who shows that building good character is a goal of business
education and gives us a way to think about where we can have an impact on
management decision making. For Hartmann, character is the way an individual thinks
and acts in balancing concerns for their own and others’ well being (p. 69). A manager
of “good character” would then be one who is capable of making decisions that support
the well being of those dependent on those decisions – i.e., all the corporate stakeholders.
Our business curriculum development will be deemed a success if we are able to produce
managers of good character who are capable of making such decisions.
If we are to produce inspired business leaders, we need to influence their decision making
such that they make “good” decisions. How do we do that? Hartmann provides some
guidance in the answer to this question. For him, “character includes virtues and vices
and entails certain values, dispositions, and emotions as well as actions” (p. 69).
Following his reasoning, if we are to understand a manager’s character, we need to
catalog his/her virtues, vices, values, et cetera and explore his/her actions. Further, if we
are to engender “good” character in our students, we need to explore the values et cetera
that lead to the actions that are classified as “good” and encourage the development of
these values in the students. We do this fully recognizing that it is quite possible for a
student to see the types of decisions classified by our schema as “good” and to choose not
to make such decisions. There are powerful forces in organizations, such as the reward
systems, that may make it very attractive for a manager to choose to injure the well being
of a set of stakeholders – retirees, for example – if it improves their own well being –
their own corporate stock options, for example. There are also people who would always
seem to make decisions for their own personal benefit to the detriment of any and all
other stakeholders. Present court testimony in the Enron case substantiates this.
However, this should not be taken to diminish the value of explicitly addressing issues of
character and value and using our business curriculum to “help make a student a certain
sort of person” (Hartmann, p. 69). For purposes of our discussion, the “certain sort of
person” would be a person of good character, i.e., one who takes concern for the common
good into consideration in their decision making.
If casual observation of the behavior of certain business leaders leads us to assume that
consideration of the common good is not a “natural” aspect of their decision making, then
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how are we to insert such consideration into the decision making of our students of
business? In order to answer this question of how character can be taught, we need to
examine how business curricula have already been changed to incorporate topics that
were not traditionally a part of business decision making. We will use two topics;
“quality” which has been successfully incorporated into business decision making and the
business curriculum and “security” which is in process.
Teaching Quality Management
A recent program on the History Channel explored the US auto industry and showed how
the industry has changed dramatically over the years since the end of the Second World
War. One apocryphal story they told concerned a particular model of Chevrolet during
the 1950’s that leaked oil at a prodigious rate. According to this story, car dealers told
customers that they could solve the problem by pouring Bon Ami cleanser into their oil to
rough it up a bit. Presumably, this wouldn’t be a problem as long as customers traded
their cars in every year. So much for quality.
We hear that story now and we think that this would never happen today. Consumer
Reports would run a cover story about the car. Consumer Protection and Highway Safety
agencies at the federal and state levels would issue recalls and warnings. And most
notably, competing car companies would make the oil leaks the centerpiece of their
advertisements. For managers, consumers and students of business, it is almost
impossible to imagine a company trying to put such a defective car out on the market or
having put it there, trying to fix it with cleanser. Why has the previously acceptable
behavior become unthinkable? The short answer is because the value for quality is now
ingrained in the decision making of managers. Getting to this point has not been
effortless.
Although the American Society for Quality Control was founded in 1946, clearly their
message hadn’t been heard at General Motors in time for the above mentioned Chevy to
hit the streets. In fact, most of the earliest proponents of building quality into production
processes found eager audiences in Japan as opposed to their home country of the United
States. W. Edwards Deming visited Japan in 1950 and launched a movement of
statistical quality control there. In the same year, Toyota introduced the first quality
circles. Joseph Juran introduced his statistical quality control techniques into Japan in
1954. By 1958, Genuchi Taguchi introduced his eponymous Method. Throughout the
1960’s and 70’s, Japanese companies digested the books, lectures and workshops on
quality and incorporated them into their production processes while US firms largely
ignored the message. The differences between Japan and the United States became so
alarming that in 1980, NBC produced a program called “If Japan Can … Why Can’t
We?” that emphasized the growing quality gap. However, the message did not
immediately sink in. It was 8 years before the US Department of Commerce introduced
the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in an effort to encourage quality
production. In 1991, Dobyns & Crawford-Mason published Quality or Else, the
Revolution in World Business that presented the specter of American industry as losing
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its place in the global market. Finally, in 1994, the US auto industry published QS-9000
Quality System Requirements to establish quality requirements across their supply chains
(Mouradian, 2002). It took over 40 years for the message to get through. This was in the
face of intense global competition that has seen the demise of the Big Three US auto
companies and the rise of Toyota as the largest auto company in the world. But the
message has finally taken hold.
Academia can take some of the credit for the increased awareness of the importance of
incorporating quality into management decision making. It is now standard practice for
college textbooks to include “total quality management” into the list of topics covered as
basics for good management. It is not unusual to have chapter titles such as “Operations
Management: Managing Quality, Efficiency, and Responsiveness to Customers” with
section headings such as “Putting TQM into Action” (Jones, et al, 2000). These chapters
provide very explicit instruction on how to achieve the end result of incorporating
quality. First, build the commitment. Second, focus on the customer. Third, measure
results, et cetera (Jones, et al, p. 655-6). Students also read stories about the successes
firms can realize. As an example, Baxter Healthcare introduced a continuous
improvement system. This cut manufacturing time by 84% and increased their
percentage of on-time deliveries to almost 100%. All of their improvements resulted in a
$3.6 million savings annually. For all this, they won the Shingo Prize for Excellence in
Manufacturing (Daft, 2003, p. 670). With this approach to instruction, students of
management develop routines for making the “good” decisions to be sure that their firms
produce products of high quality.
An analogous change in the teaching of management is taking place at present in the
incorporation of security issues into supply chain management. Since the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, the federal government of the United States has made security of
the borders a national priority. The fact that US industry imports billions of dollars worth
of subcomponents and finished goods is no deterrent to the government’s pursuit of the
goal of secure borders. In a speech in 2001, then ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci
said “…security trumps trade” (Thompson, 2003, p. 21). The message could not have
been more clear. The changes in supply chain management could not be more dramatic.
Prior to September 11, it was not unusual for a subcomponent in the auto industry to
cross the border between Michigan and Ontario 6 times before final assembly. Strategists
in the auto industry had built their supply chains under an assumption of a “borderless
world” where the choices of suppliers were made according to such criteria as quality
(since this was now part of the decision making) and cost (since that was always part of
the decision). After September 11, security of the border and security of the supply chain
became interlinked. The solutions that managers have undertaken are locational (i.e.,
they have required their suppliers to locate either warehouses or production facilities on
the “right” side of the border), technological (i.e., they installed sophisticated locking
systems on their trucks and warehouses) or opportunistic (i.e., they have found new
suppliers) (Snodgrass & Gessner, 2005). Managers on both sides of the US borders have
fully realized that they will not be able to do business across the borders if they cannot
prove the security of the supply chain.
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This concern for security is now becoming part of the curriculum on supply chain
management. New textbooks emphasize the need for securing the supply chain and offer
strategies for doing this. Unlike the concern for quality management that took over 40
years to find its way into standard business curricula, concern for security has been
incorporated in less than 5 years. Statements such as Ambassador Cellucci’s made this
an imperative.
The point is that for either competitive or regulatory reasons, business practitioners have
changed how they go about doing business. And in order to be useful to managers,
business curricula have changed to incorporate the new topics. Before the Japanese auto
manufacturers started to gobble up North American market share, US auto firms could
have cared less about quality. Before September 11, 2001, US managers were making
supply chain decisions that assumed the borders did not exist. In both cases, two criteria
that did not appear to be “natural” parts of business decision making became key criteria.
The question we are trying to answer now is whether or not consideration of the
“common good” can be incorporated into management decision making by incorporating
it into the business curriculum thus producing “inspired business leaders”. Trying to
answer this question is complicated by the fact that there is neither a compelling external
reason to change nor a clear definition of what the outcome measure should be. We have
seen that both of these were necessary for changing the discussion on quality and
security. There were compelling external reasons to change managerial behavior vis a vis
quality and security. There also exist fairly concise criteria for determining “bad” quality
or “insecure” processes. Measures such as the numbers of defects, customer complaints,
transborder shipments that get confiscated by Customs officials, and other explicit
outcomes give very clear signals as to the “goodness” of managerial decisions regarding
quality and security. This lack of either motivation or measurement of change in terms of
“inspired business leadership for the common good” does make our discussion materially
different from the ones that took place concerning quality and security. However, this
does not make our discussion vacuous.
There have been efforts made to indicate that there are compelling reasons to try to
achieve “responsible” managerial decision making even in business organizations in a
capitalist society that have to satisfy the needs of those capitalists, i.e., they have to
provide profitability. There is certainly a robust literature that supports the idea that there
is a relationship between ethical behavior and profitability. There is a belief that ethical
behavior will result in increased sales because consumers will want to reward this. Firms
that treat their employees ethically should realize increased levels of productivity. Firms
that don’t pollute the environment will realize cost savings through improved processes.
However, years of empirical research have not found a conclusive relationship between
corporate responsibility and profitability (Vogel, 2005). The best that some researchers
have found is that, at a minimum, behaving responsibly does not seem to do great
damage to corporate profits (Roman, et al, 1999). So, if behaving in a socially
responsible manner (one that promotes the “common good”) does not increase
profitability, can that really be “responsible” behavior? (Vogel, 2005) does provide us
some direction out of this dilemma. According to his argument, requiring socially
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responsible behavior to result in profitability is needless. There is no empirical proof that
other expenditures, such as on advertising, result in increased profits. But we don’t all tell
our consulting clients to eliminate their marketing departments. So, just because research
hasn’t shown a direct link between socially responsible behavior and profits, we
shouldn’t recommend irresponsible behavior. And if “doing good” is essentially costless
in this regard, what’s the harm in doing good?
The second issue of the lack of a clear outcome measure is a bit more problematic. Even
if we say that the goal of our curriculum redesign is to produce “inspired business
leaders”, i.e., managers of good character, capable of making decisions that provide for
the common good, it is not clear what “managers of good character” are exactly. For
purposes of continuing our discussion, it may be easier to approach this by trying to
determine what “managers of good character” are not. Since we want to examine this in
the context of managerial decision making, we can begin by examining examples of
managerial behavior that might be understood to reflect “bad character”, i.e., decisions
that do not support the common good nor reflect inspired business leadership.
Deviant Managerial Behavior
There is a fairly rich and varied literature on employee misbehavior and the influence that
managers have in creating an atmosphere for deviant behavior (Litzky, et al, 2006). Most
of this literature catalogs the types of misbehaviors that employees engage in as having
an internal impact –e.g., theft or cheating on time sheets. Although these behaviors
clearly can have a negative impact on the firm, they generally are not discussed as being
of “strategic” importance. Our approach takes a slightly different spin on the idea of
“employee misbehavior”. While non-managerial employees work within the constraints
of the systems established by management, managers have to function within the
organization culture, also. And it may be assumed that the results of deviant behavior by
managers can be more damaging to the firm than those from non-managerial employee
behaviors. This is because management decisions are strategic, impacting all the
stakeholders of the firm and having long term impacts.
Unfortunately, most of the research on deviant behavior is on non-management
personnel. However, it is not unreasonable to assume that typologies of deviant behavior
are just as applicable to managers. The literature indicates four types of workplace
deviance: production, political, property and personal (Litzky, et al, 2006). Production
deviance relates to damage done to the quality of the product or service. Political
deviance is favoritism or other activities that give one individual an advantage at the
expense of others. Property deviance is theft or other unauthorized use of organizational
resources. Personal deviance is any form of hostility or aggression.
At this point we can say that it would be good for us to help our students understand how
to avoid making deviant decisions. In order to do this, we need to teach our students how
decisions get made and the choices they have as managers. Then they can understand
what has to change in order to achieve “better” outcomes and how a “person of good
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character” would behave. In order to deconstruct this potential for change, it is necessary
to examine the decision making process.
Management Decision Making
The premise of the approach taken in this paper is that changing the behavior of
managers will be accomplished by changing their decision processes. The literature on
individual decision making provides models for understanding how to do this. Triandis
(1980) gives us a way to understand how humans make decisions. In his schema,
decisions are prompted by a set of decision premises. The actual nature of these premises
can vary from the very explicit and formal (e.g., rules and laws) to the very implicit and
informal (e.g., values and assumptions).
Decision Premises      Decision Behavior
(Laws, Rules ----- Values, Assumptions)
An individual makes decisions based on the strength of these underlying premises. As an
example, I sit at the red light at 3:00 in the morning even though there is no traffic
because it is the law. On the other hand, I go through the red light at 3:00 in the morning
in this dangerous neighborhood because I value my life. By this model, if we want to
change someone’s decision making, we can either change the rules or change their
values.
The literature on management control systems puts the individual decision maker into the
organizational context. According to this approach, organizations can exhibit
bureaucratic control systems (with lots of rules and regulations) or organizational cultural
control systems (with lots of enculturation processes and bonding exercises) (Child,
1981; Ouchi & Jaeger, 1978; Jaeger & Baliga, 1985; Snodgrass& Grant, 1986). The
choice of the two extremes in types of control systems is a function of the organizational
preferred modes of action which, in turn, are influenced by dominant societal cultures.
(adapted from Snodgrass & Szewczak, 1990).
Bureaucratic Control
Societal Culture  Preferred Modes of Action 
Organizational Culture
Control
As an example, French society (according to Hofstede, 1980) prefers to avoid risk taking
actions. This leads to highly bureaucratized French organizations with strict rules for
managerial decision making. By contrast, Japanese society (according to Hofstede, 1980)
prefers activities that support the group. This leads to the development of very strong
organizational cultures that control decision making. Managers – who may or may not be
members of the dominant society – bring their own set of values, etc. (their character)
into the organizational setting and they make decisions. In order to change the decision
making of the managers in the system, either the rules can be changed (e.g., reward the
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manager for improvements in quality, security or “the common good”) or change the
corporate culture (e.g., shun the manager who ends up in court for a product liability suit,
violations of Homeland Security rules, or polluting the air).
In the cases of quality and security, it would seem that if nothing else has changed, the
rules have. Global competition has made it very difficult to succeed in business over the
long term with inferior products. Consumers do not have to put up with poor quality.
Managers recognize that even if they wanted to get something out to market quickly, this
could be a problem. In the case of security, the need to change has been made even more
explicit. The federal government will impose the security measures at the borders
deemed necessary to keep the country safe. Over and over again, this has been shown to
be at the cost of business.
In the case of the “common good”, the rules have not changed. There is no competitive
or regulatory reason for business decision makers to care differently about the common
good or make changes to business decision making processes. This is where we come in.
We can help to change the values that our students bring into the organization and apply
in their managerial decision processes. In fact, it may be easier to accomplish change this
way since college students may still be looking for ways to “become the persons they
want to be” or “to avoid becoming the persons they do not want to be”.
A Teaching Model: Learning by Example
In this teaching model, we begin by explicitly recognizing the forces in operation in
management decision making and the role that individual students will play in this
process when they join organizations after graduation. The decision process described
above requires students to examine the societal values that envelope the organization and
many (but not necessarily all) of the managers within it. This provides a point for
discussion of desired organizational outcomes and the possible “common goods” that can
or should be achieved. As an example, in France, job security is highly valued.
Managerial decisions that provide for job security – over other possible good outcomes
such as job enrichment – are to be encouraged.
Secondly, organizational systems are explicitly examined. The dominant systems of each
organization have characteristics that can be described and evaluated. This is easily done
by reading the first page of the annual report where the corporate philosophy and values
are usually displayed. The veracity of these corporate statements can be evaluated
against stories about the firms in the press.
While it is important for students to recognize the societal and organizational contexts of
their decision making, it is also true that they will not have much control over them. It
may be that the best students can achieve with this part of the model is to determine
where they will or will not choose to work – never take a job in Human Resources in
France, try to get a job with Johnson & Johnson. It is the third part of our teaching model
that is the core of our attempt to actually change individual managerial decision making
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by influencing our students’ understanding of the individual’s role in the decision
process. We deconstruct the decisions that managers have made and try to understand
what kind of people made them. Then the students can decide what would have to
change in order for the decisions to change. The students can control the development of
their own character. They can decide the kind of person they want to be.
The actual decisions that we deconstruct can be found in many places. One of the most
powerful ones is the case of the Ford Pinto and the cost/benefit analysis they did that led
managers to decide not to install the safety shield that would have saved the lives of the
victims of the rear end collisions (Hills, 1988). Other examples can come directly from
the daily news. At present, the Enron case provides an almost endless supply of material.
However, these cases are a bit “remote” either in terms of time or scale. Students are
generally fairly clear that they would not kill innocent people or steal millions of dollars.
Instead, greater success can be found by using real life examples of “deviant managerial
behavior” that describe situations students might actually find themselves in and where
actual choices could be made. Examples of such deviant behavior by a manager can
easily be found. These can serve as the basis of a classroom discussion to determine
“who would behave that way?”1 The following are four such examples.
Production deviance: An example of production deviance by a manager relates to a
hiring decision. In this case, there were two part time employees who were applying for
a full time job. One employee had finished a series of training programs at a local
college that gave him the certifications to do the job. The other had some training but it
was in a related field. In this case, the manager (without benefit of discussion with the
employees’ supervisor) hired the second candidate. This might have just been shrugged
off as one of the inherent inequities of the workplace if it weren’t for the fact that the
unqualified employee actually could not do the work. Other workers had to pick up the
slack – with no increased compensation. Customers started to complain about the lack of
quality of the service and started to take their business elsewhere. As the morale of the
other employees suffered and the sales figures declined, this manager was confronted.
Her response was that this was her decision to make.
Political deviance: An example of political deviance relates to work schedules. In this
case, a subdivision in the organization had established a work schedule that mapped
directly to the variations in the needs of their clients. In this situation, some of the clients
needed repeat treatments over a week long period at specific intervals. This meant that
the employees had to be at work on a schedule that was not always easy to adapt to other
demands on their time. On some days they might need to be at work for just a few hours.
On other days they had to be there for long hours. However, the employees had all
agreed to this difficult scheduling because they were all professionally trained and they
believed that the type of service they provided required this. After years of this, one of
the employees decided that she no longer wanted to deal with this inconvenient schedule.
1
The examples of managerial behavior that exhibit workplace deviance have been gathered over the years
from colleagues and friends at all types of organizations, institutions and companies in various parts of the
world. Most have been documented through company emails and memos. People send me these vignettes
because they know I collect them. The names have been changed to protect the deviant.
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Without consulting anyone in the division, the manager gave the one employee – and
only this one – a very easy schedule. Needless to say, the rest of the employees were
extremely upset by this blatant favoritism. Some refused to comply with the demands of
the old schedule and insisted on the easier schedule also. This, in turn, up set the clients
who then began to seek out other service providers who were willing to deliver the
service on the schedule required.
Property deviance: An example of property deviance by a manager relates to the abuse
of the parking privileges at the company’s urban location. In this situation, the manager
acquired a parking pass from another manager even though she was not entitled to this
benefit from the company. This office is located in the downtown district of a major city
and parking is very tight. Parking privileges are given out only after many years of
service and only to the highest level managers in the company. When this manager
parked with the illegally obtained pass, she was denying others who had rights to the
parking area. In addition, she was defrauding the company of the costs of parking in the
pay lot. Further, she was violating the city’s parking ordinances. Had she been ticketed
for parking illegally, the costs for each ticket would have exceeded $100. So she also
defrauded the city of the parking fines. Apparently, her deviant behavior caused quite a
stir among the other managers who were playing by the rules. At latest update, she is still
parking illegally.
Personal aggression: An example of personal aggression by a manager relates to the
psychological harassment of another manager. This is a very difficult situation for a
company because an aggressor can always hide behind an excuse of “well, it’s really just
my opinion.” In this case, a senior manager undertook a campaign of terror against a
subordinate for reasons that never became clear. The harassment took the form of memos
and emails criticizing the subordinate’s dress, physical demeanor and speech patterns.
The senior manager started rumors and told other managers very strange tales about the
subordinate. The harassment became so nasty that the subordinate’s work began to
suffer. Then the senior manager began to send emails and memos berating the
subordinate and telling her that the manager had lost all confidence in her ability to do the
job. None of this harassment ever rose to the level of being actionable in a legal sense.
So, the subordinate had no legal recourse and could get no relief from upper level
management. The morale of the other junior level managers suffered greatly and many
chose to leave the company instead of running the risk of being subjected to the same.
If we, as educators, believe the decisions described above are “bad” or “not in the
interests of the common good”, what can we do to make things right? Can we change the
organizational control systems that provide the context for managerial decision making?
In the short term, probably not. Can we influence the values our students carry with them
into that context? Isn’t that why we do this? Students can be introduced to such examples
of observed managerial behavior. Then they can work backwards to deconstruct the
decision premises that would underlie this behavior. This is not really a new concept. In
fact, the use of case studies in management courses is done to try to deconstruct a set of
decisions that have gotten a firm into a particular situation that can be analyzed.
Hartmann (2006), Hartley (2005) and many others recommend the use of case studies in
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the teaching of business ethics in order to give the students the opportunity to develop
their values and virtues.
Our approach differs slightly because we put managerial decision making into the context
of the organizational control system to try to deconstruct the forces that impact individual
behavior. Was a manager simply “following the rules of the company”? Or does the
decision reflect a particular values stance on the manager’s part – “who would make that
kind of decision?” In addition, we try to get the students to go back into the decision
process and determine what has to change in order for the decision making to change in
order to achieve a good outcome. Would more transparent hiring processes result in the
better candidate being hired? Would a decentralized scheduling process allow everyone
to be involved with and supportive of the weekly time commitments? Would a more
stringent organizational culture that values honesty result in everyone parking where they
are allowed to? Is there any organizational process that can control someone who is
simply nasty and aggressive? Then the questions become “What would a manager of
good character have done?” What would be a decision leading to the “common good”.
What types of decision processes would lead “naturally” to consideration of the
“common good”.
As we lead our students through this deconstruction, they can begin to develop their
“good character”. Even without clear criteria for assessing the outcomes, students begin
to develop the intuition to apply the rules. According to Hartman (2006), this is exactly
what we should be trying to achieve in the classroom. Our goal is to help our students
develop the appropriate “intuitions” so they can know how to work their way through
complex and conflicting decision points; in essence, to make them “virtuous” people
(p.77). When we help our students to develop their character, we are helping them to
become “inspired leaders for the common good”. As Hartman (2006) states (interpreting
Aristotle), “People of inferior character often do the wrong thing not because they have
bad principles, though many do, but because their intuitions do not lead them to
apprehend the situation under the right principle” (p. 77). Clearly, we want our students
to be management decision makers of good character.
Curriculum Design
The changes in management decision making that we have described in this paper are
similar to the changes that took place when “quality” became an ingrained part of
corporate decision making. Prior to the quality movement, car dealers felt it was
perfectly all right to tell their customers to add cleanser to their oil. Nowadays, it would
not even occur to them to do that. It would not even enter into the decision process. It
wouldn’t even be an option. This is what needs to happen with “inspired business
leadership for the common good”. We need to change our business curricula to include
explicit consideration of the development of managers of “good character”, i.e., those
who take into consideration concern for the common good and who avoid decisions that
are deviant or bad. We need to provide our students with models to show what needs to
change in organizations in order for “good” outcomes to occur. And it needs to become a
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“natural” part of organizational decision making. It should not even occur to a manager
of good character to terrorize their subordinates. There should be no sense in which the
“common good” would be served by giving one employee a favored schedule over the
others. It shouldn’t even be an option for an inspired business leader to hire an inferior
candidate. And people of good character do not park illegally.
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