From Business Week –

Have business schools contributed to creating overconfident and self-focused leaders? I suspect many of you will nod your head in agreement. You might even declare that, by extension, business schools share blame for the economic crisis. As a business school dean, I take these perceptions seriously; there is enough in them to warrant careful reflection.

An antidote to overconfidence and self-focus in business leaders may lie in building more focused cultures in our business schools. Culture is the set of values and norms in an organization that shape behavior. It acts as an internal gyroscope for everybody in the organization to keep them in balance, acting ethically and in line with the larger interests. It is what people do “when the manager is not looking.”

Yes, all we have to do to fix our bizarre cultural worship of pirate CEO’s is to tinker with business school attitudes. The root of all evil is based in schooling probably in those ethics classes.

I get tired of hearing this nonsense. It is important to have good business schools. It is important that they communicate ethics, attitude, business knowledge and considerable training. But that’s it.

A business school is not like wading into a pool blessed by an angel and getting healed.

Overconfident attitudes and overly proud, ridiculously vain attitudes are not based in business school curriculum but in larger society.

If we want to change that, we give stockholders a say in how the company runs, put rigorous controls on executive salaries and change bonuses to consider long term contributions and actual contributions.

James Pilant