GUEST POST
By Rich Danker, MPP/MBA 2010

Rich is a student in Pepperdine’s three-year Master of Business Administration/Master of Public Policy program, graduating in April. His aim is to work in finance or economics.

Over and over again at the Graziadio School of Business and Management I hear the refrain from students that they are interested in sustainability or corporate social responsibility as a career. These phrases have left many MBA candidates captivated, here and on other campuses across the country. Indeed, it seems to be the hot topic in business for this era; much like strategic management was for the 1990s. The fact that so many students are aiming to work in a field that sounds well, dubious, is a cause for concern. How did we get here?

Corporate social responsibility – or CSR, as they call it – is supposed to be a way for companies to measure and monitor their impact on the wider world. Every layer of society – the ethical, legal, environmental, and political realms – is relevant in assessing how a firm operates. The ultimate goal is to create a certification system that quantifies performance in these areas. Hand-in-hand with this is the stakeholder theory, a concept which proposes that the purpose of a business is to serve the variety of interests which have stakes in the company: shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, as well as communities and governments. The stakeholder model upends the two established notions of business purpose – creating profit for the owners and, as Peter Drucker formulated, creating and keeping a customer.

Corporate social responsibility and the stakeholder theory are radical departures from the traditional ways of understanding business. These ideas don’t go so far as to venture to replace them, but in some cases they can be weighted equally. Indeed, Triple Bottom Line analysis claims to account for the firm’s contribution toward people, planet, and profits. Students frequently list it is a qualification on their resumes.

Have these business students suddenly gotten altruistic or uninterested in creating wealth? Has an army of do-gooders swarmed our schools? Maybe. But more than anything else, the whole thing appears to be a product of our times. The current crop of degree-takers came of age during the Enron scandal, a cauldron of fraud, deception, and expertise that confirmed the worst impressions about American big business. The other crackups following it – including a chief executive’s $6,000 shower curtain and Martha Stewart’s lying to the feds – brought to the forefront a layer of seaminess and self-regard. It prompted business schools to roll out courses in ethics with these case studies in mind. Corporate social responsibility expanded upon this by looking beyond the individual to the company, and asking us to consider its behavior. Read more »

By Siawn Ou, MBA 2010

“Oh, I thought you were Chinese…”

That’s weird, I thought I was too.

It must be an odd phenomenon in China for a person of native blood to have any sort of deficiency in the Chinese language. Whenever someone breaks through the layers of my fluency in conversational Chinese, my cover of passing for a native gets blown. What ensues is a sequence of puzzlement and denial on their behalf, until I put them at ease by reciting the abridged version of my life story that I have become so accustomed to doing… “Born in Beijing and grew up in the States. Where? Boston, but now I live in Los Angeles (they wouldn’t know where Malibu was anyway). Oh, I left China at age 6. Yes both my parents are Chinese. Yes we spoke Chinese at home.”

Afterwards I am accepted as one of them again. *Relief*

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By Mike K., MBA 09′ Candidate

I’m working on one of my last projects for the FEMBA program, a paper on central banks for my Global Capital Markets & Institutions class.

Now, unless you don’t live on this planet (or maybe in the right BRIC nation), it’s hard to not be constantly aware of the shifting paradigm regarding global economies and financial markets in lieu of the deep recession in the U.S. and its impact on the rest of the world.  Beginning with the collapse of Bear Sterns and the subsequent bail out of AIG, among others, back in the fall of 2008, there have been actions and interventions in global capital markets by central banks and governments unlike any the world has ever seen.  You hear talks of $80B in loans here, $500B in liquidity injections there, and while you grasp the size of these amounts its easy to lose perspective in the abstract terms these figures mean, in aggregate of whats happened the last two years, and what will happen in the future.

Going back to my paper for Global Cap…  in doing research on the Fed and the impact of their actions since the fall of 2007, I came across a great visual representation of what exactly the Fed has undertaken with the goal of attempting to stabilize the financial markets in the U.S. (and the world), preventing further declines in the GDP of the U.S., and stabilize prices stoked by fear of deflation (2007) and now inflation or maybe even hyper-inflation (today) in a book titled, The Road Ahead for the Fed, by John B. Taylor & John Ciorciari.

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By Siawn Ou, MBA 2010

Facebook was banned in China as of June 2009. It appears the reason for this was that people were rallying online in protest of the recent conflict between the Uyghur and the Han Chinese. The Uyghur are a Muslim based minority group in China.

Uyghur in China are probably most commonly recognized for the eateries they run. Their most popular dish: grilled lamb skewers. This one simple food unbiasedly resonates with locals and expats alike in the same way that Fenway Franks resonates with Red Sox fans. I’ve seen ritzy women come out of high end clubs, stumble over in their heels to one of these food carts, and delightfully satisfy their drunchies on lamb. As my friend once said of the Uyghur, “they make delicious food for everyone”. And it’s quite true. Read more »