Management has never been taken seriously as a profession, despite sporadic campaigns to elevate it alongside law, accountancy and the like. Its professional ambitions have been constrained by the lack of clarity or uniformity in what managers actually do. Also, the stereotype of the average MBA graduate as a grasping, bottom-line fixated financial manipulator has not helped.

Now the balance is being re-dressed. A group of 33 second-year students on Harvard Business School’s MBA programme have created an MBA Oath as a way of establishing clear and unequivocal professional standards.

The tone of the oath is a combination of the US Constitution and an annual report: “As a manager my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognise my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the wellbeing of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face choices that are not easy for me and others.”

Eight promises follow. They include: “I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner” and “I will strive to create sustainable economic, social and environmental prosperity worldwide.” The popularity of the MBA Oath is surpassing all expectations. The initial aim was to persuade 100 of the Harvard class of 2009 to sign up. At the last count more than 1,600 MBA students worldwide had taken the pledge.

Among them was Carlos Silva, an MBA student at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. “Given the problems of the downturn and their origins, it is important to show that the majority of MBA students don’t only think of their careers and money,” he says. “They think about their social responsibilities. It is the right message.”

Another Saïd MBA student, Katharine Hill, echoes this point: “I think there was probably a very different feel to our MBA programme than those which had gone before. The context is different.

“By signing the oath I wanted to make a public point that an MBA is not solely focused on finance and making use of financial knowledge. The oath makes sense to people throughout the world. It is a bit cheesy perhaps, but I would rather be associated with the oath than with some of the other associations of an MBA.”

One of the influences behind the Harvard oath was an article by the Harvard Business School professors Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria, which argued the case for management’s acceptance as a profession and proposed an equivalent of the medical profession’s Hippocratic Oath for managers.

“If management were to be seen as a true profession guided by a broadly agreed upon and shared global code of business conduct, our expectations of the moral conduct of managers and their expectations in themselves would rise. This can be an important step in restoring the frayed trust in business and capitalism,” they said.

Some are sceptical. Henry Mintzberg, author of Managers Not MBAs, is a long-time critic of standard MBA programmes. “If Jeff Skilling, the ex-President of Enron who is now in jail, was faced with this when he was at Harvard Business School, he would have signed in a flash. All this nonsense does is indicate how disconnected the business schools are from reality.

“Ethics is not some case study debated furiously by people utterly removed from the issues. Unfortunately it becomes that when people so trained are given responsibility for corporations. Management is a practice rooted in context, not a profession based on pronouncements.”

Pronouncements are on the rise, nonetheless. A different approach is taken by Canada’s Richard Ivey School of Business. Every one of its graduates takes a pledge on graduating to act ethically and with integrity. They are then presented with an Ivey Ring. The rings have a unique serial number and are not for sale. For some, professional management comes with a ring attached.

I promise to...

The Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona has introduced an MBA Oath:

“As a Thunderbird and a global citizen, I promise:

I will strive to act with honesty and integrity
I will respect the rights and dignity of all people
I will strive to create sustainable prosperity worldwide
I will oppose all forms of corruption and exploitation and I will take responsibility for my actions
As I hold true to these principles, it is my hope that I may enjoy an honourable reputation and peace of conscience.

This pledge I make freely and upon my honour”