Goldman Harvard recruit pledges to take ethics oath

When Larry Estrada graduates from Harvard Business School next week, he’ll begin work at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. He’ll do so only after taking an oath.

Estrada, 30, joined about 150 fellow business school students and faculty worldwide to campaign for the acceptance of an MBA ethics pledge modelled on the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors. The aim is to get as many as 6,000 graduates at 50 MBA programs to swear they won’t put personal ambitions before the interests of their employers or society.

Created last year by Harvard Business students to counter a growing public mistrust of business, the oath is being championed by Nitin Nohria, the newly appointed dean of the school. After the global financial crisis, Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme and scandals at Goldman Sachs, there has never been a better time for managers to rethink their role in society, said Rich Leimsider, director of the Aspen Institute’s Centre for Business Education, in New York, which is helping to coordinate the movement.

“One of the things we’re hoping to do is force hundreds of thousands of people in business to talk about and think about their responsibilities,” Leimsider said. “Nitin has given Harvard a huge head start in that direction.”

484 MBAs
Last year, 484 new MBAs at Harvard Business School, in Boston, took the pledge, inspired partly by an article by Nohria and Harvard professor Rakesh Khurana, in the October 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, calling for a code of ethics for managers. About another 1,500 took it at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, and at other US management schools, Leimsider said.

“For me, it was a stake in the ground, to say here are my values, here’s what I believe in,” said Estrada, who plans to work as an investment manager for Goldman Sachs in Seattle. “When I have a tough decision, I want to be in a position where I have my own personal oath.”

Not all Harvard Business students support the oath. About 45 per cent of the graduating class of 886 last year didn’t take it, and a similar share won’t this year, either, Estrada said.

The oath is “the knee-jerk reaction by business apologist to the current financial crisis,” Justin McLeod, 26, a Harvard Business student, wrote in the Harbus, a school publication.