Prophets to profits

The first time I walked around the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and looked at its massive and elegant buildings, its manicured lawns and pampered flora, I thought of Moses. According to the third chapter of the book of Exodus, as Moses stood on Mount Sinai before the burning bush he heard a voice that said, "Come no nearer; take off your sandals; the place where you are standing is holy ground" (verse 5).*

On the fourth day of classes our marketing professor, Mark Albion, inquired of the members of Section F whether or not we would like to introduce ourselves to one another. After all, he said, we were going to be spending an entire school year together in the same room and we might like to know who our section-mates were.

As we went around the room, I counted two lawyers, eight consultants, nine accountants, 17 engineers, and 23 bankers. Twenty-five of my classmates had gone to Ivy League schools, and 35 had majored in economics or business administration. Of those who had worked for large corporations before business school, four had worked for oil companies, three had worked for Procter & Gamble, three had worked for IBM, and two were currently on leave from General Motors. One fellow had been a captain in the Cold Stream Guards and had led a platoon in Northern Ireland; another, a Marine Corps lieutenant, had served in Beirut at the time of the airport bombing. Also among our ranks were an architect, a Canadian ski instructor, an Australian veterinarian, a former assistant to the prime minister of Japan, and me—an Episcopal priest who had left a position at Grace Church on Tenth Street in Manhattan to pursue graduate studies in the relationship between economics and Christianity.

My wife, Dana, and I moved to Boston because she, toting a newly minted Ph.D. from Yale, had been hired as an assistant professor at Boston University's School of Theology. I had the choice of searching for a parish in the area or entering a doctoral program in business policy and business ethics. Figuring I could always return to the parish, I leapt into an experimental year at the West Point of corporate capitalism, the esteemed Harvard Business School.

A stranger in a strange land

During my first few days at Harvard, I could not stop thinking about a woman I had known my last summer weeks in New York. She used to sit curled up in a ball in an alcove just to the left of the front steps of Grace Church. The smell of urine and the clouds of flies were overpowering. Even when the temperature reached 90 degrees, she huddled in a filthy winter overcoat, and she never touched the small cups of water and juice I would bring to her. At night or in a rainstorm she would disappear, but she would always return in the morning.

I tried to speak to her, but she never responded to anyone. That is, until a New York City medical team arrived. She cursed them violently and insisted she was fine and just wanted to be left alone. And so she sat on the steps. Every day I would talk to her and bring her water that she did not drink, until finally the summer ended and I moved away.

The truth is that I barely remember what happened those first weeks of school. Suddenly I'd been yanked from the cool Gothic halls of Grace Church, where I'd spent my days preaching, teaching, counseling, and working with the destitute street people of New York, and dropped into the world of business school, with its perplexing courses in marketing, accounting, managerial economics, and organizational behavior. Instead of relying on the language of theology, a language filled with such words as salvation, redemption, forgiveness, and grace, I was abruptly required to speak with an entirely new vocabulary, which consisted of phrases like depreciation tax shield, cumulative probability, distribution curve, product cannibalization, net present value, and subordinated convertible debenture. Instead of pondering the apostle Paul's logic in his letter to the Romans, I found myself designing a consumer and trade promotion campaign for Vaseline petroleum jelly.

It was also my fortune (or misfortune, depending on whom you talk to) to belong to the first MBA class to be required to purchase individual personal computers. In the summer we had all been mailed archly worded letters announcing that we would be expected to buy an IBM portable computer, through the university, for a mere $3,200. About the same time, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal questioning the machine's value, popularity, and future prospects. A spokeswoman for IBM responded with what she considered decisive evidence of the portable's merits: the Harvard Business School was ordering 800 for its upcoming students. Even I, a computer illiterate, realized that this was not an auspicious sign.

Since I had touched a computer only two or three times in my life, I brought mine home in early September and approached it with some of the awe one might expect from a Cro-Magnon man facing a TV set. Fortunately, I was able to assemble it, figure out that a floppy disk was something one put in a disk drive, and find the "on" switch. I was immensely reassured when the floppy disk, "Exploring Your IBM Personal Computer," began its little tutorial with a squeaky rendition of the opening bars of Mozart's Fortieth Symphony.

In the first weeks of class I also discovered that the business school relies exclusively on the case method to teach business skills. This means that you are confronted with a detailed account (including reams of numbers and charts) of some business problem an executive is facing. You must begin by figuring out what's going on (often the most difficult task), then somehow derive a solution, and finally prepare a few remarks so that you will have something to say if you're the hapless student chosen at random to make the opening presentation the next morning. This analytical process is repeated with little variation approximately 400 times during the school year, giving rise to a famous school adage: "First they scare you to death, then they work you to death, then they bore you to death."

In class

The business school gives tremendous weight (often 50 percent of one's grade) to classroom participation, and I realized early on that I would have to overcome my paralyzed silence. This was difficult because my classmates, who had the benefit of several years in business, were hurling words and concepts around the room with alarming and ferocious alacrity.

Even more difficult than mastering the language was the problem of what identity I should adopt in the classroom. I had made it very clear on my application that I was not leaving the ministry and that I intended to teach or return to the parish, but from the moment I began classes at Harvard, I was an anomaly wherever I went. At business school, I was peculiar because I was a minister; with church friends and other ministers, on the other hand, I was equally peculiar because I was in business school. This tension between the life of faith and the life of business was exactly what I had come to the business school to reflect on, but it was distressing to find the tension so soon and within myself. I found it very tricky to know how to act in class.

Once in a while I spoke up about what I thought were broader political or ethical issues raised by the cases. Was it really necessary to close this plant and throw hundreds of people out of work? Did any sane human being really want overpriced deodorant socks to be conveniently available in supermarkets? What effect might these massive shampoo-marketing efforts we were planning have on the families we had targeted? Isn't it possible that this highly profitable hospital chain might be earning money by excluding the poor? The class seemed to tolerate my outbursts but rarely supported them.

Once I tried to break out of the mold of class ethicist, just to see what it was like. We were discussing the problems of a men's cologne that was declining in popularity. I raised my hand and said, "It's all image and air anyway, so let's capture that air with a campaign built on the most expensive sort of snob appeal." The professor looked startled. "This from a man of your background?" The class laughed.

I still don't know whether he meant it as a compliment or a reproof. In any case, I never again recommended something I didn't believe in. I stuck to the role I had been granted as a liberal bellwether, a miner's canary who, as long as he didn't pipe up or keel over, certified that ethical boundaries were being respected.

With all the long hours of class, I had lots of time to look around the room and daydream. One thing that always struck me was the abnormal percentage of physically attractive people at the business school. The men are generally tall, square of jaw, and highly athletic; the women distinctively attractive and frequently preppy. Rare indeed were unshapely figures, stringy hair, nondescript faces, pasty complexions to say nothing of disability or disease or other signs of human mortality. The people at the business school actually looked like the people in ads for Caribbean vacations or expensive liquors; they looked like winners.

Sometimes in my daydreams I would remember what it was like to stand in my vestments in the sanctuary of Grace Church, with the great Te Deum window behind me, the long nave aisle leading to the rose window of the narthex before me. On the table in front of me lay the polished silver paten and chalice given by generations now long gone, the white fair linen, the open prayer book, and the simple sacramental elements of bread and wine. I remember the powerful sound of 500 voices singing:

Holy, holy, holy Lord

God of power and might,

Heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest.

I would watch the people approach the altar rail, all sorts of people—the young and the old, the mighty and the frail, the honored and the despised, the joyful and the tortured. All would kneel; all would stretch out their hands to receive something that a material world cannot give: hope, forgiveness, and deliverance. All would come, and I was privileged to glimpse their eyes and see their longing assuaged, not through anything I had done but through some mysterious yet evident love that was reaching out to them.

As time went on I got to know the students better, and the more friends I made, the more I suffered from a dilemma. On an individual basis, I found many of my sectionmates to be truly charming and thoughtful people. Despite the competitive pressures, mathematically minded students willingly helped those who were struggling with numbers. When a student's mother and a professor's father died during the school year, the outpouring of emotions and donations was immediate and genuine. Some people even found time to participate in volunteer activities, such as becoming a Big Brother or organizing a blood drive.

I benefited all through the year from many people's friendship and assistance. Joel Poznansky, for example, picked me up and drove me to school for several days after I had hurt my knee. The night before the accounting final, Jeremy Freedman spent an hour with me on the phone and cleared up some of my questions, thereby allowing me to squeak through. And I was delighted when a dozen classmates from almost as many denominations formed a little Bible-study and fellowship group. We met every Tuesday for lunch and talked about our backgrounds, our beliefs, and our doubts. Before each exam we would briefly meet to pray, asking God for perspective on the whole ordeal.

Ministering to classmates

Some of my classmates offered me the opportunity to minister to them in moments of personal distress. One woman described her painful separation from her husband and daughter; another man told me in moving detail about the death of his father. On different occasions three people burst into tears as we talked, pouring out fears about their futures and frustrations with relentless pressure of the first year. And at least a third of the class approached me at one time or another to tell me privately that they agreed with some objection I had raised in class, and to confess that they found it difficult to know how to sport such objections.

During one three-day case series, we studied a cold remedy that introduced no new medical features into the market place and whose advertising budget would represent 60 percent of its retail price. I decided to keep quiet and see what people would say. After the second day, nine people came up to me separately to inquire why I had not yet objected to this "piece of crap." I encouraged them to speak up, but they blushed. Even one professor remarked, again privately, that the product was terrible. But in three days of class, no one openly objected.

And thus the dilemma: Privately and personally the students were warm human beings, but publicly many adopted aggressive, cynical, and callous styles. In the fall we saw a movie on the coal miners' strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, and the sight of the overweight miners' wives brought wave after wave of cackling derision. When, in a discussion of textile workers in England, it was revealed that a woman who had sewn for 12 years for $ 100 a week might lose her job, the class almost unanimously felt she deserved to be laid off, since she was being paid too much.

Moreover, all day long the students talked about money. Discussions about money in such courses as managerial economics, control (the business school's term for accounting), or finance always had a clinical quality, as though money were a force with its own properties and principles, like electricity. At meals, though, the conversation would turn to money as something to be pursued for the freedom and pleasure it gave. People would talk about how much a person used to make, or how much someone had inherited, or how much they would earn. At one lunch students were surprised and titillated to hear that a second-year student graduating in the class of 1985 had "broken the barrier of $100K" by landing a job with an investment bank for what turned out to be a starting salary of $140,000. One day I asked a fellow student what he most wanted to do in life. "What I most want to do is make a great deal of money," he said amiably.

Corporate commandments

To keep my sense of perspective, I tried, with uneven success, to maintain a regular discipline of daily prayer and Bible readings. The morning before my finance exam, the lectionary pointed me to a passage in the Gospel of Mark:

"As [Jesus] was starting out on a journey, a stranger ran up, and, kneeling before him, asked, 'Good Master, what must I do to win eternal life?' Jesus said to him . . . 'You know the commandments: "Do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not give false evidence; do not defraud; honour your father and mother." 'But, Master,' he replied, 'I have kept all these since I was a boy.' Jesus looked straight at him; his heart warmed to him, and he said, 'One thing you lack; go, sell everything you have, and give to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven; and come, follow Me.' At these words his face fell and he went away with a heavy heart; for he was a man of great wealth" (Mark 10:17-22).

It might seem unfair to generalize about the attitudes of 1,600 MBA students. As a whole they were conservative, but there was a smattering of liberals dispersed throughout the sections. And though the general attitude toward ethics was that it wasted time, there were some students who thought and said otherwise. By the end of the year, however, I came to feel that these students were the exception that proved the rule and that there was a strongly shared perspective, a faith, as it were, common to almost every one of my classmates.

The first article of faith in HBS doctrine was an unquestioning conviction of the economic and moral superiority of large-scale corporate capitalism. The basic justice and integrity of current economic arrangements were never publicly challenged. There were many corollary tenets to this central creed, notably the following:

1. Competition is always the most efficient means of distributing resources.

2. Government is always inefficient and something to be reduced, controlled, and even mocked.

3. Monopolies are bad if you are on the buying end, but good if you can achieve them in your own industries (this is called building market share).

4. American workers are fat, slow, and inefficient, and labor unions are a destructive force.

5. Poverty and unemployment are the result of inefficiency and are primarily the fault of the poor and the unemployed.

6. Almost any marketing or promotional campaign can be justified on the grounds that if a consumer actually buys the product, it must fulfill sortie "need."

7. Individual greed always aggregates to a larger good, therefore the rabid pursuit of materialism is without question a good thing.

Since the case method requires the professor to ask questions and play students' responses off one another, I often wondered how my professors really felt about these matters. Were they also so cynical? Did they endorse the primitive social Darwinism that prevailed among the MBA students?

Curriculum versus culture

By Christmastime I got up the nerve to visit different professors to inquire about the curriculum and about their feelings on ethics in business. Many of them, in contrast to the students, were eager to talk about the profound moral and philosophical problems of modern business. I even detected a certain frustration with the students' narrow focus.

The more I talked to the professors and listened to their comments in class, the more it seemed that they had a definite mission they were seeking to fulfill through the design of the curriculum. Not only did they intend to turn out well-rounded general managers, but many of them also hoped by doing so to arrest or reverse America's decline as a manufacturing nation and world competitor. The constant theme in the case material was that Japanese firms have outperformed American firms because they have designed marketing programs that are more responsive to consumers, organizations that are more sensitive to employees, and factories that take seriously the contributions to quality and production offered by workers. The message to us was direct and simple: American managers must become more attentive listeners, more humble, more interested in the long term than the short, and more devoted to the success of their companies than to their own careers.

Although this was what the curriculum stressed, the culture at the business school, harking back to an earlier, more arrogant time, emphasized the reverse. Students were graded on a forced bell curve, which rewarded people with prior training and work experience and automatically failed the bottom 10 to 15 per cent in each class. The stereotype most admired by students was that of the "tough hands-on manager," someone who justifies his or her high pay by being the crisis solver, the problem fixer, and the head basher. When we studied People Express (which attributed its early success to its innovative and responsive personnel policies), the students reluctantly agreed that these policies were a good idea, but as soon as we were con fronted with an open-ended problem, many again recommended top-down, management-directed solutions.

The great job hunt

At no time is the emphasis on individual success and achievement more evident than in the frenzied winter mating season when recruiters arrive on campus. Throughout the fall, students rewrite and edit their resumes, pore over annual reports and lists of alumni at the Career Research Center, and join such organizations as the Finance Club, the Marketing Club, the Investment Banking Club, and the Venture Capital Club (in part to get their names inscribed in special club books). Then the recruiters arrive and the students begin a swirling dance of first-, second-, and third-round inter views and callbacks that lasts for three weeks. Attention is paid to the most minute details of performance and appearance. "I was going out the door to an interview," recounted one friend, "when my roommate stopped me and said with alarm, 'You can't go to a bank interview wearing brown shoes!' He made me change them."

Occasionally I went to the business school in a suit because I had appointments in tow immediately after class, and each time my sectionmates playfully inquired if I had "given in" and decided to interview with McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. "Come on, Bob, "one good friend of mine said. "Those consulting jobs look pretty good, don't they? Wouldn't it be fun to tell other companies what to do? Wouldn't you like to make $ 1,300 a week for a summer job?"

Though I usually responded that I would be working as a research assistant during the summer, I inwardly agreed: it would be fun. And Dana and I could use the money.

But whenever I would start to fantasize or worry about "all the money I really deserved to be making," I would look through the Bible, and the fever would leave me. One passage that struck me combined words of warning with words of support: "We brought nothing into the world; for that matter we cannot take anything with us when we leave, but if we have food and covering we may rest content. Those who want to be rich fall into temptations and snares and many foolish harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and perdition. The love of money is the root of all evil things, and there are some who in reaching for it have wandered from the faith and spiked themselves on many thorny griefs.

"But you, man of God, must shun all this, and pursue justice, piety, fidelity, love, fortitude, and gentleness" (1 Tim. 6:7-11).

The spectacle of hundreds of students desperately searching for work was not without irony when one remembered the ease with which these same students proposed shutting plants and firing workers who had been employed for 25 years. The students, however, do not consider themselves to be in the same league (dare I say species?) as workers; they have become managers. Having put up as much as $30,000 for tuition and earned a degree from Harvard, they feel they deserve a job. They believe that they are now entitled to a high salary and to the unquestioned right to make decisions about other people's lives.

Elitism

That pervasive sense of entitlement bothered me more than anything. It made me realize that as much as I loved being a member of Section F, as proudly as I wore my F TROOP baseball cap, the sectional system is designed to create and reinforce a sense of managerial elitism. High pressure and close contact for nine months create bonds, the bonds create a sense of peer group, and the peer group forms a culture that sets it off from the rest of the world. Like those who have been through boot camp or some peculiar initiation rite, students who survive the first year at the Harvard Business School become the members of a club, and, by definition, a member of a club is a better person than a nonmember.

I came to the business school because I had stood outside the corporate club for years and criticized it. I had criticized it in part because I did not understand what businesses actually did and because I had been on the receiving end of business activity all my life—of its products, its advertising, its pollution, its political clout. After my year at Harvard, I understand more and so I am less critical about some things. I now understand, for ex ample, how extraordinarily difficult it is to run a business, how many complex and divergent parts—finance, marketing, sales, production, distribution—all have to be coordinated. And I have come to believe that there is nothing wrong and, in fact, much that is good about a few people coming together, pooling their resources, and trying to provide a service or a product for which they earn a return on their investment. In other words, I have become a fan of small business.

However, the question I brought to the business school—what is the relationship between such economic activities and the Christian faith?—is going to require a good deal more work. For one thing, the question has been debated by theologians since the beginning of the church; it is a derivative of the thorny problem of how closely or distantly the church should participate in the institutions of the world. Over the centuries some have argued, at one extreme, for complete withdrawal from society, whereas others have baptized whatever the culture designates as good with a sprinkling of holy water.

For the serious person of faith who commutes between a church on Sunday and a corporate job on weekdays, who is drawn by the hope and joy and freedom of the gospel yet must live amidst the rules of the marketplace, such extreme answers offer little solace. Church leaders fortunate enough to have money to set aside cannot escape the difficult question of how to invest those funds in a manner consistent with their beliefs. And on a global level, no person who professes that all human beings are beloved children of the same God can be complacent in a world where hundreds of millions live in subhuman poverty.

As the year progressed, I came to realize that the most profound question posed by a place like the Harvard Business School is one common to every human endeavor: What greater goal or God are we individually and collectively called to serve in life? The biblical logic that governs my faith says simply that human beings can never be happy as long as they build their lives around false gods, that is, things that seem to grant life or power but in fact cannot.

And so as a minister in a business school I found myself wondering all year what the school is really teaching. Some might argue that it communicates a useful and value-free body of knowledge the same way a school for auto mechanics communicates certain functional skills. But an alternative view occurred to me when once during the course of the year I returned to a gathering of the members of Grace Church, and someone welcomed me back as "one of our three seminarians who have gone off to study." Another speaker commented, "I know we live in Orwellian times and war is peace, but I never thought I would hear the Harvard Business School described as a seminary. But I don't know. Maybe it's true."