Passage 3 Diversity: Different Strokes for Similar Folks
MBA生源多样性变迁 《经济学人》

 

[00:01]Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago.
[00:07]In it the majority of students scratching away furiously
[00:13]will have conformed to the standard model of the time: male,
[00:18]middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however,
[00:24]and you'll get a completely different impression.
[00:28]For a start you will now see plenty more women
[00:32]the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, for example,
[00:37]boasts that about 40% of its new intake is female.
[00:44]You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups
[00:48]and nationals of practically every country.
[00:52]It might be tempting, therefore, to think
[00:56]that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved.
[01:03]But, increasingly, this apparent diversity
[01:08]is becoming a mask for an insidious new type of conformity.
[01:14]Behind the differences in sex and sexuality,
[01:18]the varying skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes,
[01:24]expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones
[01:31]among the business leaders of the future.
[01:34]A future in which the methods and motivations of geniuses in Bangalore,
[01:40]Beijing and Boston are impossible to tell apart.
[01:46]Many of the corporations which led us into the current economic mess
[01:52]were also the most enthusiastic hirers of MBAs. Diversity, it seems,
[02:01]has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership.
[02:07]So what can be done to create more effective attendants
[02:12]of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier,
[02:17]associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process
[02:24]by which MBA programmes recruit their students.
[02:29]At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria
[02:35]such as prior academic and career performance,
[02:39]analytical and problem solving abilities and skills.
[02:45]This is then coupled to a school's picture of what a diverse class
[02:50]should look like, with the result that passport,
[02:54]ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors.
[03:00]But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant tick,
[03:07]to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude
[03:12]and approach-arguably the only diversity that, in a business context,
[03:19]really matters.
[03:21]Professor Gauthier believes schools
[03:24]should not just be selecting 'usual suspect' candidates
[03:30]from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry.
[03:36]They should also be seeking individuals who have backgrounds in areas
[03:42]such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy,
[03:49]which will allow them to put business decisions into a wider context.
[03:56]Unless at least some students on a programme have this sort of grounding
[04:03]and the open mind that hopefully goes with it
[04:07]then the increasingly fashionable focus on ethics
[04:12]and social responsibility is unlikely to
[04:15]have a significant effect in the long term.