Interview with George G Brenkert on Building Ethical Organizations
August 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

DR. George G Brenkert
Professor of Business Ethics at the McDonough School of Business, George town University.

• What is the importance of alumni in enriching and upholding the legacy of a business school?
  Alumni can and should be a source of contacts for business school faculty and students. Alumni may provide jobs, introductions to possible jobs, and suggestions where students may find jobs. They may also provide faculty with opportunities to do research in their companies, as well as to consult with their companies. More generally, they can serve as a source of new information and experiences in business that may be conveyed to students and faculty through in-class presentation and general lectures at business schools. Finally, they may serve as a financial source for programs and activities that could not otherwise be funded. In short, alumni should be seen simply as individuals who have graduated from a business school, whose names are kept in record books, and who are only seen during yearly alumni weekends.

• How do you see the next few decades for MBA program across the globe? Do you think there is toomuch of proliferation of business schools and therefore the dilution in the delivery?
  There is a great proliferation of business schools. Some of this dilutes the quality of students and faculty associated with those schools. Another crucial development is that of online schools of business. The quality and role these play in the next decade should be a matter of major concern for all. There is both great promise and important dangers here.

• Professor, how do you measure the success of a business school? What parameters would you use to assess the performance and potential of a business school?
  When I judge a business school abstractly, I consider the quality of the faculty in both the quality of their publications and their teaching. I look at the kinds of students they produce and what they do upon graduation. And then I consider how their administration is able to foster excellence in the previous two categories (faculty and students) in a manner that represents the values and norms of that organization. However, the success of a business schoolmight also be judged in light of how it treats its alumni (see my responses to a previous question), as well as how it interacts not only with the rest of the university, the business community and the larger community. Business schools also have stakeholders and its success depends upon how it listens to and interacts with all its stakeholders.

• Are the business school rankings a proof of the quality of a business school?
  No, they are not. This is not to say that they are meaningless, but that they must be used with great caution. They are one indicator that is worth considering. The danger is that too many become fixated on this one indicator. To begin with there are a variety of rankings of business schools— and they do not always agree. Second, the criteria for the rankings are not something of which the public is generally aware. They could find out what they are; but evaluating those criteria and judging their meaningfulness is something else. Besides the quality of a school must also be judged in light of the particular student who seeks a business education. A high quality school (according to the rankings) may not offer the kinds of classes a particular student wants or might best benefit from. Just as we should be careful to judge the quality of a student simply by his or her grade point average (GPA), so too we should be careful to judge the quality of a business school simply by where it stands in the rankings.