This paper critically examines Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria's 2008 Harvard Business Review article, "It's Time to Make Management a True Profession." The authors argue that in the wake of financial crisis driven by unethical practices, business leaders must adopt formal codes of conduct, professional certification, and civic responsibility—much like law and medicine. This paper reviews their proposal for an AACSB-administered licensing exam for MBA graduates, acknowledges its appeal, and raises substantive objections: the absence of empirical evidence that professional boards improve ethical conduct, the breadth and volatility of business compared to law and medicine, and the difficulty of codifying ethical obligations across competing stakeholder interests.
This paper demonstrates source-critical analysis: it accurately represents an argument from a credible publication, concedes its merits, and then systematically identifies logical gaps and unsupported assumptions. This technique — steelmanning before critiquing — is a hallmark of graduate-level analytical writing.
The paper opens by defining performance management broadly, then narrows to the HBR article's ethical reframing. It walks through the Khurana–Nohria proposal in detail before pivoting to critique: the weakness of the law-and-medicine analogy, the lack of empirical support, the volatility of business knowledge, and the difficulty of moral codification across competing obligations. A brief conclusion summarizes the unresolved tension.
Traditionally, performance management has been understood primarily in terms of securing a sound bottom line for a business. As one management authority defines it: "Simply put, performance management includes activities to ensure that goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner. Performance management can focus on performance of the organization, a department, processes to build a product or service, employees, etc." (McNamara 1997). However, according to the Harvard Business Review's October 2008 issue, in the wake of a seismically shaken and constantly changing business climate, conventional wisdom has shifted to take ethics as well as profitability into account when evaluating organizational performance. Unsound ethical practices regarding mortgages and credit lending are at the heart of the modern economic meltdown.
In response to this crisis of confidence, Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria argue: "To regain society's trust, we believe that business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond their responsibility to the shareholder to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians. In other words, it is time that management finally became a profession. True professions have codes of conduct, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education of their members" (Khurana & Nohria 2008, p. 1). Hence the title of their article: "It's Time to Make Management a True Profession."
Some business professions, such as accounting, have tried — and one could argue have failed — to forestall crisis through the use of governing bodies. Nevertheless, there is an advantage to having standard operating procedures and codes of conduct for a profession: such regulations provide ethical guidance. Business, however, is so broad and far-reaching in its modes of professional education, and the issues CEOs and managers are required to address so varied, that even higher education strains to encompass them. As Khurana and Nohria observe: "Although the MBA has been the fastest-growing graduate degree over the past 20 years, it is not a requirement for becoming a manager. Managers do not have to sit a formal exam to demonstrate their knowledge even at the end of an MBA, let alone stay current in their field. There is no obligation for them to know anything about investing in innovative new financial derivatives or special purpose vehicles, for example, even if they serve on boards required to approve such potentially risky transactions. To the contrary, data on enrollment in executive education programs offered by business schools suggest that people who already possess an MBA are less likely than those who don't to invest in lifelong learning in the form of continuing education." (Khurana & Nohria 2008, p. 1). Standardization, they argue, would also add value to the MBA degree in the eyes of the business world and restore confidence in both businesses and business school education.
At present, the main standardized requirements for MBAs are modest accreditation requirements for business school programs and the Graduate Management Admission Council's use of the GMAT exam to gauge a prospective student's intellectual ability. Under the Khurana and Nohria plan, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) could devise and administer an exam that all graduating MBAs would have to pass before being licensed to practice — covering ethics and other forms of knowledge, much like the bar exam. Under this system, holding an MBA would imply demonstrable understanding of instruments such as credit default swaps, just as a lawyer must understand torts.
No evidence is presented that performance management would become better — either more ethical or more efficient — through the establishment of a code of conduct and certification before a professional board. Much of the argument amounts to a kind of "me-tooism": because law and medicine have such structures, why shouldn't business? But will these extra steps address the areas where modern enterprise is genuinely lacking, or will they merely divert resources? No empirical analysis is offered or cited.
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