Daily Archives: December 9, 2009

For the second installment of Lexington 24:25’s series “24-to-25 Minutes with…” we sit down with Professor Don Schepers.  When we met with Professor Schepers,  whose areas of expertise include Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Ethical Decision Making, it was our intention to discuss the changing graduate management education landscape, his role as Director of the Zicklin Center for Corporate Accountability, and his efforts in developing a new MBA in Sustainability.  However, as our conversation took place on the eve of the UN’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, we couldn’t help but throw a question in about that as well. 
The following is the transcript from Lexington 24:25’s 24-to-25 Minutes with… Professor Don Schepers.

Q. Graduate management education, and the MBA in particular, has been criticized widely during the financial crisis.  What, if anything, should business schools be doing differently?

A. That’s a very difficult question to answer.  On the one hand, many business schools have instituted programs in ethics. As one of the miscreants said – this is Walt Pavlo who was indicted for embezzling $6million from WorldCom –he said that MBA schools tend to train little terriers.  When students come out of MBA schools they are like little terriers.  They just nip and nip away; they are tenacious.  We want good, aggressive, tenacious students.  At the same time we also need students who have a really strong moral fiber and say this wrong, or this needs to be fixed or this is something I can’t do. There is a program I started using this year called Giving Voice to Values.  It hits at some of those issues.  The assumption is that most of the students who go to business school want to do the right thing.  What they often don’t know when they are confronted with something other than the right thing is how do you answer.  How do you raise objections without getting fired? This program is intended to help students learn and practice a bit.  Specifically, how do I say something when I really need to object on an ethical basis?  I think those are the kinds of programs that we are going to see more of in business schools today.  They really address some of those core issues.  You are never going to stop having people like Bernie Madoff or any of the other Ponzi schemes and insider trading or any of those things.  What we can do is give the more tools to those people who want to do the right thing. That’s the tack that business schools really need to focus on.

Q. You have been at Baruch College Zicklin School of Business for over ten years now.  How would you describe the change in MBA students you have witnessed over that ten-year period?

A. I think there was a big kick point when Enron happened.  For the first couple of years I was here – from 1999 to 2001 – it was almost an apology for teaching ethics.  Once Enron happened, I didn’t need to apologize for teaching it any more.  Students needed to know it, they knew they needed to know it.  So, we got about the business of what we really needed to learn and what we needed to do in the business community. I think in the last three years, there has been another turn and that is in the area of sustainability. Students are much more focused on what needs to be done in order to make the business community a more sustainable community, to make business a more sustainable enterprise.  The immediate focus is about our environment, but the deeper focus is about social issues.  Those are much more difficult issues to get a hold of and to put into a sustainable business plan. 

Q. Many schools are adopting curriculum with a focus in sustainability.  Students have demonstrated an increased interest in the area. Clubs like Net Impact have become incredibly popular.  Students participate in sustainable case competitions and sustainable entrepreneurial ventures.  For students who are devoting such a great deal of their curricular and co-curricular attention to sustainability, what career opportunities do you see as becoming available?

A. What we at Zicklin are trying to do with the MBA in Sustainable Business is to provide opportunity for a double major.  I think the career opportunities are not yet there for somebody who is solely focused on sustainability and I don’t know that they ever will get there.  I don’t have that crystal ball.  We do now have people who are corporate responsibility officers, who are corporate ethics officers.  Nobody 10 years ago – actually 15 years ago because 10 years ago those positions started coming into existence – but in a 15-year span those specializations have grown.  So, will there be sustainability officers?  I don’t know.  My guess is at this point that the entry point for most of our students is going to be an accounting major who knows how to deal with sustainability on the accounting balance sheet; that’s going to get somebody a job.  It’s the same for finance; it’s the same for marketing; it’s the same for operations.  Operations managers who have supply chain responsibilities, if they come out with a sustainability side to their degree, they are going to be a prized commodity because business today is very much looking at the question of how it is we push these values down the supply chain.  I can’t buy something and say its carbon foot print is “this” if the carbon foot print of my subcontractor is twice what mine is.  All of that has to get wrapped into a product.  When we look at the carbon footprint of a product, we have to look at the whole thing. 

Q.  You have an incredibly diverse background (please see bio below).  How does your background affect your teaching and scholarship?

A. For one, I have always valued teaching.  That is at the core.  And, I think the theology and the divinity degree, there has been a lot of philosophy in my background.  That gives me a basis to talk about the ethical issues, to deal with the ethical issues on a substantive level.  So, that informs my work with the Business & Society materials. 

In regards to scholarship, I have done a little bit of work with the philosophy side of my background.  I really have not gone too much into that.  It was a part of my original research when I was looking at individual decision making.  That was very much based on philosophy.  Now that I look more at the corporate side, there’s a little less philosophy at that level.  There is more of a strategic orientation.

Q.  The Mission Statement of the Zicklin Center for Corporate Accountability reads, “resolving conflicting corporate stakeholder interests.”  What does the Center mean by that exactly, and what does it do in that regard?

A. Conflicting stakeholder interest occurs anytime that you have two people looking at the same pile of money.  Employees want to get paid more; board members don’t want to give, they want to take care of shareholders.  You need to balance out all of the needs of all of the stakeholders.  Customers want quality for their money.  So, everybody has a piece of the pie here.  What we do, and this is actually occurring today, we are having an audit conference for the practitioners in the area and there is a great deal of conversation about Fair Value Accounting.  That’s a core issue for protecting the shareholders.  So, making sure that those kinds of events take place, educating our students on the different issues, that is what our core mission is.  We have an event on Monday night about scandals.  We had an event about campaign contributions.  What we do is try to run events that typically can’t be run in the classroom, but that give our students and others an exposure to a broader set of materials and broader discussion about the current events in the business community.  That’s what really needs to take place.  We need to get more people involved, more discussion going and when we have these discussions, we need to point people in specific directions that we can do some research on and that we can make some policy around – so that the next generation, who will still have problems, won’t have the same problems. 

Q.  What is your vision for the future of the Center?

A. I think there is going to be a couple of things.  We are certainly planning on continuing the level of activity that we currently have going at this point in time.  I think the expansion that we are going to see is two-fold.  One, I think we will look much more heavily at the corporate governance area.   We are looking very seriously at how we do that and how we can do it better. We are discovering the real issues we need to deal with there, perhaps even going into the area of corporate governance education for directors.  The second area is beginning a more structured research program.  There are a number of people in the school who are starting to look at the different sides of sustainability and how that impacts finance, how it impacts accounting.  We want to start doing research programs that address those issues.  If that demand really builds, we would want to be the place for them to come and discuss those kinds of research programs. 

 

Q.

  The leaders of the world are about to converge on Copenhagen to tackle climate change?  In your opinion, what needs to take place in Copenhagen for the conference to be considered a success? 

A. I think that is a very hard question because in the minds of many people it is just not going to be successful.  Success would have been predicated on reaching some sort of binding agreements.  And at this point I think what we are seeing is a discussion that is at best agreeing to what will be further discussed.  That is about as good as it’s going to get I think.  Some people are talking about reducing carbon emissions  – the total amount of carbon emissions.  Others are talking about – and this is particularly from the developing countries – emission intensity, which is the amount of emissions per GDP.  So as their GDP ramps up, they can actually emit much, much more carbon.  That is not the same set of goals as saying, “let’s reduce carbon emissions, period.”  Europe is very much in favor of the absolute reduction; the U.S. wavers back and forth; China is very much in favor of talking about emission intensity.  Even to just continue having the discussion is going to be one of the major outcomes of that meeting.  For many people it’s a very disappointing set of outcomes.  But given the nature of the discussion and the real complexity of what’s being discussed, that’s probably as good as it’s going to get. 

One of the more interesting issues will be the politics of it.  President Obama shows up at the beginning of the conference but most of the other heavyweights show up at the end because that’s when the agreement starts to get hammered out.[editor’s note: the day following our interview, President Obama announced he would be showing up towards the end of the conference]  What he leaves in his wake will be very important and whether those representing the U.S. at that point have the power to do anything is going to be an interesting set of issues.  It’s not so much a science issue at this point as it is a political issue.  That will be one of the most interesting perspectives at this point: what will the politics look like at the end of the day. 

Lightning Round

Time Person of the Year?  Teddy Kennedy

Company that best represents corporate accountability? Johnson & Johnson

Best case study used to demonstrate corporate accountability? Heineken in Africa

Daily/weekly/monthly you cannot live without?  The Economist

Favorite vacation destination? Florence

Carbon Trading or Carbon Tax?  Carbon Trading

Highland/Lowland/Speyside/Islay? Single Malt is really good enough

Book on your bedside stand?  Justice by Michael Sandel

If you weren’t a professor at Baruch, what would you be?  Working as an ethics officer

World Cup 2010 Champion? I don’t follow the World Cup.  I’ll have to ask my brother-in-law

Professor Don Schepers Biography

Professor Schepers was appointed Director of the Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity in July 2009.  He is Associate Professor in the Department of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York.  Professor Schepers has taught business strategy at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and social and governmental environment of business at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive education levels.  His field of specialization is business ethics, and the intersection of business, government, and society.

Prior to his Ph.D., he taught high school science and mathematics, and was President of the Marianist Retreat and Conference Center, a small non-profit conference center outside St. Louis, Missouri.  He holds an M.B.A. from Tulane University, a Masters of Divinity from St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology, University of Toronto, and a Masters of Science in Business Administration and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Arizona.

Professor Schepers has published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Business and Society Review, Business and Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Human Resource Management Review, and Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management.  He also has numerous cases and book chapters to his credit.  He is a member of the Society of Business Ethics, the Academy of Management, the Eastern Academy of Management, the International Society for Business, Economics and Ethics, and the International Association of Business and Society. 

Important Links:

Zicklin Center for Corporate Accountability: http://zicklin.baruch.cuny.edu/centers/cci/