Skills Table from RethinkingUndergraduate Business Education and Rethinking the MBA
Area
Ethics
Skills Description
Knowing (RMBA 103-6 and 160-1)
“facts, frameworks, and theories that
make up the core understanding of a
(Dan LeClair gave Patrick profession or practice”
Cullen’s presentation,
 Ethical Theories
“Redesigning the MBA,”
 Basic Moral Concepts
at the AACSB Associate
 Intermediate Moral Concepts
Deans conference on
Doing
11/14/11. The knowing,
“skills, capabilities, and techniques that
being, and doing triad is
lie at the heart of the practice of
presented on slide 3)
management”
 Ethics Advocacy
Also see Erik Wingrove Critical Thinking
Haugland, US Coast
Guard Academy, “On the  Problem-Solving
Relation of Military Ethics Being
“values, attitudes, and beliefs that lie at
to the Values and Needs
the heart of the practice of
of Society” On the
management”
military source of the
 Attitudes
Knowing-Doing-Being
 Beliefs
triad
 Values
Cullen’s skills for MBA:
 Critical Thinking
 Design Thinking
 Experiential Learning
 Managing in a Global
Context
More Skills
Best Practices
Hastings Center Objectives
quoted from Pritchard,
Reasonable Children
Business Ethics—Indiana University (RUBE 98)
Joel Rubin (Undergraduate)
14 in-depth case studies
Multiple roles and responsibilities of managers
 person
 economic agent
 company leader
 citizen thinking beyond the firm’s boundaries
1. Stimulate the moral
imagination of students
2. Help students recognize moral
issues
3. Help students analyze key
moral concepts and principles
4. Elicit from students a sense of
responsibility
5. Help students accept the
likelihood of ambiguity and
disagreement on moral matters,
while at the same time attempting
to strive for clarity and
agreement insofar as it is
reasonably attainable
(Quoted from Pritchard)
Course—Leadership and Corporate Accountability (HBS 158165)
(Stakeholders and Duties/ Harvard Business School MBA Program)
Investors
 Fiduciary Duties: trust including going beyond contractual terms
Employees
 Challenges: power asymmetry and safe and secure workplace
 Duties: fair and impartial employment rules; fairness and fair
treatment
Customers
 Challenge: information asymmetries
 transparency and disclosure including informed consent
Public
 Challenges: market and government failures: pollution, incomplete
regulation and corruption
 Met by responsibilities to society and public at large
Debates: Ethics Bowl
Petrick—Wright State Model
Three Rs: Rules, Roles, Results
Debates: Emory model from
McDaniel: Exchanges based on
civility, empathy, and respect
Teamwork
(RUBE 59-60)
Ethics of Teamwork
module explores reflective
exploration of meaning
through three “reflective
moments”; Practical
Reasoning is emphasized
as groups/teams
experiment with group
decision-making
Social
Entrepreneurship
(Skills of Moral
Imagination, Systems
Thinking, and Deep
Dialogue are set forth by
Patricia Werhane et al on
the pages cited on the
right)
Analytical Thinking
 Formal knowledge that is general in
nature and context independent
 Deductive reasoning from principle
to particulars
Multiple Framing
 ability to “work intellectually with
fundamentally different, sometimes
incompatible, analytical
perspectives”
Reflective Exploration of Meaning
 Exploration of meaning, value, and
commitment that, in the past, was
conveyed by the Liberal Arts
Practical Reasoning
 “capacity to draw on knowledge and
intellectual skills to engage
concretely with the world”
Moral Imagination
 “ability to discover, evaluate and act
upon possibilities, not merely
determined by a particular
circumstance, or limited by a set of
operating mental models, or merely
framed by a set of rules or rulegoverned concerns” (75)
Systems Thinking (21)
 a complex environment of
interacting components together
with the networks of relationships
among them , that identifies an
entity or a set of processes
Deep Dialogue (130)







Creating shared goals and
strategies
allocating tasks efficiently
and fairly
Persuading their teammates to
adopt particular goals or
approaches
Engaging differing
perspectives with civility and
respect
Negotiating compromise
solutions to disagreements
Managing conflict and other
difficult group dynamics
Motivating others to do their
part
(RUBE 91-92)
Experiential Learning
(RMBA 150-151)
Concrete Experience
 “involve fully and openly in
new experiences”
Reflective Observation
 “reflect on and observe their
experiences from many
perspectives”
Abstract Conceptualization
 “create concepts that integrate
their observations into
logically sound theories”
Active Experimentation
 “use these theories to make
Wharton School (RUBE 92)
Course—Leadership and Communication in Groups (students rank
one another and this forms part of grade)
Babson College (RUBE 92)
Coaching for Teamwork and Leadership (CTI)
Coaches (volunteer alumni) assess student team’s work
See also Marcel Castro, Appropriate Technology, INTD 5095
 Work in Diverse Communities
 Participatory Team Decision-Making
 Group Generating Diversity of Topics
 Besides Abilene, polarization, groupthink: group identification,
self-serving biases, self-esteem enhancement, self-fulfilling
prophecies
Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship
Babson
Computer based simulation to understand “bullwhip effect” of supply
chain (RUBE 99)
Humanitarian engineering
Course at Colorado School of Mines
Juan Lucena published 2007 Syllabus at UMass Scholarly Works
EPICS from Purdue University, especially Oakes emphasis on
entrepreneurship and results
Ongoing Project: Global Alternative Power Solutions (GAPS)
Providing “energy solutions to remote villages in rural Columbia”
(http://engineering.purdue, edu/EPICS/)

Problem Solving
and Critical
Thinking
grasp the interlocutor’s mind set or
way of framing a situation
 initiate a joint inquiry into a
common problem as equals
 develop a collective identity based
on accepting the other’s perspective
Questioning Assumptions
Logical Reasoning
Problem-Solving Framework
 Problem Specification
 Solution Generation
 Solution Testing
 Solution Implementation
decisions and solve problems”
Source: Kolb and ultimately
Dewey (denotative method)
Pedagogical Strategies
 Teamwork or cooperative
learning
 supervised practice with
expert feedback
 case studies
 heuristics such as decisionmaking steps and ethics tests
 simulations (Mike’s Bike at
Santa Clare)
 Teaching Written and Oral
Communication
Santa Clara
Mike’s Bikes—Capstone ADEM course based on simulation (RUBE
34-35)
Indiana University: The Good Steward
Liberal Arts and Management Program at IU
 environmental sustainability
 nonprofit management
 fidelity in personal and family affairs
 essays by prominent thinkers
 interviews with political leaders
 Supreme Court Decisions
Rotman School of Management
Best Practice Case Studies ( Red Hat Linux RMBA 133)
Also students read point-counter point papers such as Friedman and
Ghoshat on CSR
Lucena et al
Colorado School of Mines
Community Development Projects profiled in Engineering and
Sustainable Community Development
Community Development Project profiled by Caroline Baillie, et al in
Needs and Feasibility: A Guide for Engineers in Community
Projects—The Case of Waste for Life
Analogy between
Ethical Problem
Solving and
Design Problem
Solving
(Analogy worked out by
Carolyn Whitbeck, Ethics
in Engineering Practice
and Research, Chapter 1)
Not a choice between preexisting alternatives
(multiple choice model of
problem solving)
Rather, agent must work
at “devising and refining
candidate responses”
In a textbox, Whitbeck
refers to Strawson’s
exhortation to include the
synthetic skills of the
participant as well as the
analytical skills of the
judge in moral pedagogy.
Side Bar on Wicked Problems
The Analogy
 Rarely a uniquely correct
Rittel and Webber on Wicked Problems
solutions or response (rejects
(As summarized by Byron Norton in
multiple-choice problem
Sustainability Norton claims, in his
approach)
book, that environmental problems are,
 Some possible responses are
by and large, wicked.)
clearly unacceptable.
(Solutions generated can be
1. In wicked problems, there are
sorted into good and bad)
“problems of problem formulation.” It
 Two good solutions may have
is difficult to come up with a clear and
different advantages (They
widely accepted formulation of the
may be good in different
problem. Part of this difficulty comes
ways)
from”value pluralism.”
 (Meta) Criteria for successful
solutions
2. Solutions to wicked problems are
o achieve desired
often non-compatible. “No optimization
performance or end
solutions” can be devised. Solutions
o conform to
“based on algorithms or computation of
specifications
a simple measure” are not readily
o secure against
available.
accidents
o consistent with
3. Wicked problems are non-repeatable.
existing background
“They are unique in their complexity
constraints
and there can be no learning curve.
4. Wicked problems present an openended temporal frame. (Problems are
continually reformulated and solutions
have unforeseeable consequences in the
long term)
Four Lessons Learned from Analogy
 Begin problem solving by considering unknowns and uncertainties
in the situation
 Developing solutions is separate from problem definition
 Begin by pursuing several possible solutions simultaneously (This
responds to constraints such as scarce resources and time
pressures)
 The problem situation and one’s understanding of it change over
time. (So problem solving is an interative, nonlinear process
where one continually loops back from later to earlier stages.
Example: generating solutions may lead one to loop back and
change problem definition.
Problem solving context
 Frequently these are highly constrained situations where several
specifications (often in competition) must be simultaneously
realized over highly limiting background constraints
 This gives rise to the need to satisfy conflicting considerations
simultaneously.
 Hence Strawson’s point: it is necessary for students to learn to take
the participatory standpoint and develop synthetic skills of
“devising and refining candidate responses” to often ill structured
situations.
There is a need to interrogate the problem as well as to state the
problem as open-ended
“The strategic idea at the heart of the proposal for change is what I would describe as reciprocal integration. The authors are not just prescribing the value of the liberal arts to
ameliorate the ills of business education in particular or professional and civic education more generally. This is a far more radical proposal. They assert that liberal education
itself is also in distress, too often taught in isolation and antiseptically removed from the humans and their problems from which it purports to derive and to which it claims
relevance. The concept of reciprocal integration argues strongly that the liberal arts must be professionalized, must be framed and taught in the context of practical problems, at
least as much as practical learning needs to be enriched, nuanced, and critiqued through the lenses of the ideas and perspectives of the liberal arts.”
Lee Shulman. Forward to Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education, xi.
References:
1. Baillie, C; Feinblatt, E; Thamae, T; and Berrington, E. (2010). Needs and Feasibility: A Guide for Engineers in Community Projects—The Case of Waste for Life. Morgan & Claypool.
2. Callahan, D. (1980). “Goals in the Teaching of Ethics.” In Ethics Teaching in Higher Education, edited by Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok. New York: Plenum Press.
3. Colby, A; Ehrlich, T; Sullivan, W; Dolle, J. (2011) Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession. Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint. (@The Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.)
4. Datar, S; Garvin, D; Cullen, P. (2010). Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads. Harvard Business Press.
5. Khurana, R. (2007). From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton
University Press.
6. Lucena, J., J. Schneider, and J.A. Leydens. Engineering and Sustainable Community Development, Morgan & Claypool, 2010.
7. Mitcham, C; and Muñoz, D. (2010). Humanitarian Engineering. Morgan & Claypool.
2010
8. Pritchard, M. (1996). Reasonable Children: Moral Education and Moral Learning. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.
9. Werhane, P; Kelley, S; Hartman, L; Moberg, D. (2010). Alleviating Poverty through Profitable Partnerships: Globalization, Markets and Economic Well-Being. Routledge.
10. Whitbeck, Caroline (1998) Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
11. Norton, Byran. (2005). Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management. University of Chicago Press.
12. Rittel, H. and Webber, M. (1973). “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4: 155-169.