Chapters 26-27 ERM and Risk Mini-Case Studies – Part 1 Mini Case Studies Chapter 26, “Bim Consultants Inc.” Chapter 27, “Nerds Galore” Bim Consultants Inc. Consulting firm 10 offices in Canada 3,000 staff 30 partners “Customers are number one” But revenue is stagnant Opportunity to buy out competitor Purchase would double size and sales Negotiations must be kept confidential Nerds Galore Canadian IT service company 12 offices 1,000 employees Grew from founder’s garage Shift from small start-ups to medium size customers High turnover of 20% is causing concern Decreasing customer satisfaction Steady revenue (for now) Nerds Galore (Cont’d) Strategy from new HR VP Attract the best talent Retain talented people Manage talent Optimize the use of people Rely on outsourcers Executive team workshop to explore HR risks Inability to recruit people with needed skills Loss of staff with key internal knowledge Uncompetitive labor production Increased departures of skilled technical staff Loss of key business know-how Sean D. Jasso, Ph.D.   The Hippocratic Oath of the Manager:  Good or Bad Idea?  1  THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH OF THE MANAGER:   GOOD OR BAD IDEA?    By Sean D. Jasso, Ph.D. ©  Philosophy for Business, January 2010, Issue 56  In a 2009 Financial Times commentary, Michael Skapinker addresses a growing movement of business  school  students  taking  formal  oaths  promising  to  pay  equal  attention  to  “shareholders,  co‐workers,  customers and the society in which we operate i .”  In essence, new MBAs affirm to adhere to a stakeholder  approach to management as opposed to the age‐old “shareholder first philosophy.”  The oath is intended  to mirror the Hippocratic Oath taken by the newly graduated medical doctor, the attorney’s oath taken by  the newly appointed  lawyer to the bar, or the oath taken by the new CPA ii .   The ‘MBA Oath’ received  momentum  recently  at  Harvard  Business  School  through  the  scholarship  and  inspiration  of  professors  Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria in which the two argue that “the answer to business’s crisis is to turn  management into a profession like medicine or law iii .”  Khurana and Nohria’s vision is noble indeed, but  nobility  and  practicality  are  not  always  aligned  nor  may  they  always  be  prudent.    Skapinker  remains  skeptical about the trend of MBA oaths, but the apparent movement opens the door for serious reflection  and discussion about what management really is and can or should practitioners of management publicly  affirm primum non nocere? – “above all, not knowingly to do harm.”  What is Management – Really?  This  question  has  been  defined,  grappled,  adjusted,  improved,  refined,  and  customized  for  over  a  hundred years.   Harvard, for example,  just recently celebrated the centennial of  its Business School  in  2008  and  is  often  considered  the  epicenter  for  management  higher  educ.

1. Chapters 26-27
ERM and Risk Mini-Case Studies – Part 1
Mini Case Studies
Chapter 26, “Bim Consultants Inc.”
Chapter 27, “Nerds Galore”
Bim Consultants Inc.
Consulting firm
10 offices in Canada
3,000 staff
30 partners
“Customers are number one”
But revenue is stagnant
Opportunity to buy out competitor
Purchase would double size and sales
Negotiations must be kept confidential
Nerds Galore
Canadian IT service company
12 offices
1,000 employees
Grew from founder’s garage
Shift from small start-ups to medium size customers

2. High turnover of 20% is causing concern
Decreasing customer satisfaction
Steady revenue (for now)
Nerds Galore (Cont’d)
Strategy from new HR VP
Attract the best talent
Retain talented people
Manage talent
Optimize the use of people
Rely on outsourcers
Executive team workshop to explore HR risks
Inability to recruit people with needed skills
Loss of staff with key internal knowledge
Uncompetitive labor production
Increased departures of skilled technical staff
Loss of key business know-how
Sean D. Jasso, Ph.D.
The Hippocratic Oath of the Manager: Good or Bad Idea?
1
THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH OF THE MANAGER:
GOOD OR BAD IDEA?

3. By Sean D. Jasso, Ph.D. ©
Philosophy for Business, January 2010, Issue 56
In a 2009 Financial Times commentary, Michael Skapinker addr
esses a growing movement of business
school students taking formal oaths promising to pay
equal attention to “shareholders, co‐workers,
customers and the society in which we operate
i
.” In essence, new MBAs affirm to adhere to a stakeholder
approach to management as opposed to the age‐old “shareholder
first philosophy.” The oath is intended
to mirror the Hippocratic Oath taken by the newly graduated me
dical doctor, the attorney’s oath taken by
the newly appointed
lawyer to the bar, or the oath taken by the new CPA
ii
. The ‘MBA Oath’ received
momentum recently at Harvard Business School through
the scholarship and inspiration of professors
Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria in which the two argue that “t
he answer to business’s crisis is to turn
management into a profession like medicine or law
iii
.” Khurana and Nohria’s vision is noble indeed, but

4. nobility and practicality are not always aligned nor may
they always be prudent. Skapinker remains
skeptical about the trend of MBA oaths, but the apparent move
ment opens the door for serious reflection
and discussion about what management really is and can or shou
ld practitioners of management publicly
affirm primum non nocere? –
“above all, not knowingly to do harm.”
What is Management – Really?
This question has been defined, grappled, adjusted,
improved, refined, and customized for over a
hundred years. Harvard, for example,
just recently celebrated the centennial of its Business School
in
2008 and is often considered the epicenter for
management higher education. A wide literature
addresses management from various schools of thought
from the scientific, behavioral, to the
organizational to name just a few. Among the more
famous and perhaps practical philosophers of
management is Peter F. Drucker who identified management as
both a discipline and practice indeed not

5. easy to master due to the nonlinear complexity of
producing what management is designed to do –
produce effective results. Among the great innovations of the la
st hundred years that have moved society
forward is in fact management. At the same time, many
other thinkers in the field believe that
management has become out dated and has a wide canvas to imp
rove its very meaning. Scholars like
Gary Hamel for example, see the necessity for
management as a technology where not only is the
stakeholder approach a norm, but more importantly, strategic de
cision making up to and including CEO
succession can happen at the employee level – indeed,
revolutionary
iv
. No matter what school of
Sean D. Jasso, Ph.D.
The Hippocratic Oath of the Manager: Good or Bad Idea?
2
thought, management remains the cornerstone of organizational
productivity and progress. Simply put,
without it, entrepreneurship could never flourish, organizations

6. would flounder, and resources would be
squandered. Indeed, fueling the need for management is
competition
v
– the energy that forces
organizations to strive to create the best value for all of its stak
eholders with the aim of earning value for
itself.
Within this competitive environment there are winners and loser
s and the winners most often owe their
achievement to effective management. At the very foundation o
f management lies the virtue and reality
of the forces of markets –
the economic arena where risk and strategy bare fruit or failure
. There is little
debate that markets which are well regulated and open to
competition have borne results for the
stakeholder environment – wealth for owners and
investors, employment opportunities for the best
qualified and
innovative products and services for customers around the world
. Most scholarship and
practicing managers would agree that the successful organizatio
n that produces goods and services for

7. society has evolved into a stakeholder entity. Most
managers, employees, educators, policy makers,
owners,
investors, suppliers, and customers would sensibly agree that th
e enterprise of the 2000s can
only flourish when all of the various stakeholders listed
above are perceived as partners in the
organization’s sustainability
vi
. In fact, the ‘shareholder first’ approach to running a
business has seen
alternative movements that put the ‘customer first’ whereby pro
viding a world class customer experience
yields customer loyalty and a higher probability of sustainable r
evenues. We have even seen trends in
putting the ‘employee first’, the ‘nation first’, and the
‘environment first’. All of these ‘firsts’ are
admirable, but in the end none are sustainable without the broad
er stakeholder approach. Regardless of
the trend, at the center of any enterprise is its purpose –
usually created, defined, and mobilized by an
entrepreneur and grown by the manager. Most support
the idea that the world’s great products,
services, and solutions have been created by entrepreneurs ener
gized by a freedom of risk taking, fueled

8. by the virtue of competition,
launched by practitioners of management to facilitate the growt
h of the
idea, and yes –
supported by a return on investment for all engaged in the gam
e.
Management – A Profession?
Before we get to the bottom of ‘good or bad idea’ of MBAs taki
ng oaths, the first question is whether the
MBA might in fact already be recognized as a profession akin to
medicine, law or accounting. Properly
defined, a ‘profession’ is an occupation that requires significant
study, preparation, and specialization of a
particular field. Like the noted professions, the MBA
does require significant study of a wide field of
knowledge. The field of ‘business administration’ is purposely
general – hence, the “general manager.”
The MBA is a unique degree exposing students to the wide scop
e of all of the major skills required to run
an organization – economics, law, accounting, finance,
marketing, operations, quantitative analysis,
organizational behavior, strategy and ethics are among the stand
ards. Programs have evolved over the

9. years to include emphases in each of the above as well as leader
ship, entrepreneurship, global issues, and
an array of electives upon demand. Upon successful
completion of the master’s in business
administration is the new MBA whose academic, occupation, an
d demographic background is among the
Sean D. Jasso, Ph.D.
The Hippocratic Oath of the Manager: Good or Bad Idea?
3
most diverse student bodies of the professional school programs
of most universities. It is not uncommon
to see young and older graduates who have little to advanced ex
perience in every field imaginable at a
traditional MBA commencement.
Professions are also characterized as ‘practices’–
for example, a doctor practices medicine and a lawyer
practices law. The implication is that the profession is more of
an ‘art’ – never fully perfected and never
fully evolved. Schools of business like Harvard are well known
for their approach to teaching business –

10. closer to a science rather than an art. The case method –
a Harvard signature approach to teaching – is a
scientific model that teaches students to follow a template based
on real scenarios. To provide further
intellectual diversity for students seeking business
education, many schools over the years recognize
‘management’ to be the art and ‘business’ to be the science. I s
uggest an artful balance of both.
Adding support to the idea of the ‘practice’ of management is th
e well known philosophy coined by Peter
Drucker himself. Drucker professed that management was to be
viewed and practiced as a ‘liberal art’
because the effective manager must use a wide set of
liberal skills from politics, sociology, history,
philosophy, to psychology, among many others, to make the bes
t decision for the organization
vii
. Like the
art of medicine and law, the multitude of variables impacting a
management decision is always changing
requiring artful adaptation by a professional. So to this end, I w
ould argue that management is already a
profession whether one has an MBA or not. One is not
required to have a certification to be an

11. entrepreneur or to even run a company –
this is the great beauty and flexibility of the market system and
its bounty of creative opportunity. However, the value of the
MBA is that one has successfully completed
the rigorous and formal process of learning the critical and anal
ytical thinking required of managers. Can
these skills be learned independently of the business school? Pe
rhaps. But society has and continues to
put significant value upon the individual with formal, certified
management training. This is evident in the
traditional market‐based salaries for MBAs that remain competit
ive even at all levels of the economic
business cycle. Most importantly, however, the MBA who has c
ritical thinking skills – the product of a
rigorous university program –
continues to be the highest value added resource within any org
anization.
The MBA Oath – Yes or No?
Now to the question of whether the new MBA should take an oa
th. Indeed, an oath can add symbolic
meaning to the commencement of a new journey. Most would a
gree that a marriage without a vow is

12. not a marriage, new citizenship without an oath is not official, a
nd a presidential inauguration without an
oath (though mandated by the Constitution) is simply
impossible to imagine. Returning to Skapinker’s
commentary introduced above –
his Financial Times article does incorporate a balanced debate.
Where
the Harvard management professors assert that the MBA
should be a professional license to practice
management, Skapinker counters this
idealism with a dose of reality suggesting that any trend toward
Sean D. Jasso, Ph.D.
The Hippocratic Oath of the Manager: Good or Bad Idea?
4
Hippocratic Oaths of MBAs is only as good as the movement gr
ows beyond the university. In fact, there is
no apparent sweeping demand from the large stakeholder enviro
nment mandating managers to have a
certificate or license on their office wall affirming one’s oath to
do no harm. Moreover, and perhaps most
relevant, there exists no authentic regulatory board

13. (analogous to the medical, legal, and accounting
professions) to monitor the fair practice and fiduciary
responsibility of the oath‐mandated manager.
Rather, stakeholders simply want to see results attained
within the rule of law, within the good
governance of the firm, and within the fair playing field
of the market
viii
. Indeed, the purest moral
certification is beyond even the MBA degree and the practicing
manager who bares its name. As noted
above, it remains the simple influence of competition –
fair, dynamic, and value‐centered – that affirms all
the certification needed where buyers and sellers negotiate and
make deals based on good information,
product utility and price. When this exchange
is pure, the ethic of commerce and the morality of the
market require no oath other than a simple hand shake
ix
. When this sacred exchange is broken by fraud,
complacency or incompetence, consumers will simply demand n
ew markets to replace the old.
At the core of the Harvard professors’ vision is an economy whe
re market failure is erased or minimized

14. by the licensed practitioner. This is noble, but unrealistic.
Additionally, the Harvard vision appears to
suggest that a fiduciary responsibility by one’s managerial oath
be infused as a guarantee to his or her
client’s best interest which comes before individual profit
x
. Again, this is noble, but unrealistic. This
idealism is already infused in a well regulated market system w
hereby profit incentivizes the producer to
innovate and compete for the sustainability of the
organization made possible only by strategically
connecting to the consumer by marketing products and services
with the right quality, at the right price,
at the right location, within the rule of law. Should the enterpri
se seek an alternative strategy outside of
this consumer‐driven market, the evidence is strong that revenu
es will fall, costs will rise, and profits will
diminish. No oath can guide this arena of exchange better than
the existing social contract.
The MBA is a manager of risk for the benefit of a complex, mul
ti‐stakeholder constituency. For example,
terminating thousands of employees for the sustainability of the
firm up to and including macroeconomic
development is often a necessary management decision even as

15. difficult or unpopular the consequences
might be. The question for society
is whether a manager’s decision would be any different
if an oath
affirming his or her honor to do no harm would make a differen
ce and, most importantly for whom?
Skapinker’s article begins with a focus on the trend of schools o
f business incorporating the oath into their
programs and the Harvard professors seem to exploit a
down economy influenced by corporate
corruption as one of the reasons behind the crisis.
In a market based economy where business, government, and so
ciety are interdependent, the idea of
requiring MBAs to take an oath to effectively manage an organi
zation’s assets and liabilities for the good
of society is much like asking new parents to take an oath affir
ming they will do no harm, minimize risk,
and ensure a holistic balance of the child’s development
for the good of humanity. Simply put, good
managers will navigate the organization toward results and ineff
ective managers will be expelled by the
most powerful measure of them all – the consumer and
the owner each demanding value for their

16. Sean D. Jasso, Ph.D.
The Hippocratic Oath of the Manager: Good or Bad Idea?
5
investment. As stated in the opening, the purpose of this article
is for all stakeholders of the business
enterprise to engage in a debate of serious reflection as
to what management means in society –
particularly in the society of tomorrow. There
is no disagreement that the general welfare of a global
community linked by markets requires good management practic
ed by ethical decision makers. Yet, what
remains to be seen is to what degree consumers of this market s
ystem place on the authenticity of those
who earn a degree in management. Though the Hippocratic Oat
h of the Manager may inspire new MBAs
to do no harm, the validity of the good manager is much deeper
than any oath. As stated throughout this
article, the well regulated, dynamic, and competitive market wil
l take care of the bad behavior.
At the dawn of the new decade in an era
where globalization of trade and ideas shows only forward

17. momentum, the effective manager will be the one who embraces
the freedom of opportunity with the
responsibility of managing risk for a wide stakeholder environm
ent dependent on the firm’s sustainability.
So, to answer our original riddle of the management oath –
good or bad idea? As argued, the oath need
not take place at the commencement of a degree, but rather in th
e quiet of the manager’s heart because
the morality of the market is nothing without the morality of the
good man or the good woman. Perhaps
the better question we must ask of managers is actually the simp
lest of them all – what do you stand for?
i
Financial Times, June 23, 2009
ii
Khurana, Rakesh and Nohria, Nitin (2008) Harvard Business R
eview (October), pp. 70‐77.
iii
Financial Times, June 23, 2009
iv
Hamel, Gary (2007). The Future of Management (with Bill Bre
en). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School
Press.

18. v
Porter, Michael (2008). On Competition: Updated and Expand
ed Edition. Boston, MA: Harvard Business
School Press.
vi
Carroll, Archie B., and Buchhotz, Ann K. (2008).
Business and Society: Ethics and Stakeholder
Management, 7
th
Ed. Florence, KY: South‐Western Cengage.
vii
Drucker, Peter F. (2008) Management: Revised Edition
(with Joseph A Maciariello). New York, NY:
Harper Collins.
viii
De Kluyver, Cornelis A. (2009). A Primer on Corporate Gover
nance. Williston, VT: Business Expert Press.
ix
Zak, Paul J, Ed. (2008). Moral Markets: The Critical
Role of Values in the Economy. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
x
Khurana, Rakesh and Nohria, Nitin (2008) Harvard Business R
eview (October), p. 72.

19. Chapter 28-29
ERM and Risk Mini-Case Studies – Part 2
Mini Case Studies
Chapter 28, “The Reluctant General Counsel”
Chapter 29, “Transforming Risk Management at Akawini
Copper ”
The Reluctant General Counsel
Business Software Corporation (BSC)
Silicon Valley, CA
Annual revenue over $1 billion
Board wants ERM
Upper management supports establishing ERM
EVP of development and general counsel
Doesn’t want to be involved in ERM
Risk discussions could be discoverable in lawsuits
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
Requires disclosure of risks
Recommendation is to not formally pursue ERM
Akawini Copper
AkawiniCoppe
Mining company acquired by larger United Minerals
Single mine and plant

20. $774 million in revenue
1,500 employees
United Minerals implemented ISO 31000 framework
Substantially more sophisticated than Akawini’s RM
Launched project to transform Akawini RM to ERM