Ethics Has a New Advocate at Questrom School of Business

Laura Pincus Hartman, the inaugural director of the Harry Susilo Institute for Ethics in a Global Economy, is charged with propagating ethics through the Questrom School of Business curriculum. Photo by Adriane Ayling

Laura Pincus Hartman wants companies to behave ethically because, after all, it’s good for the bottom line.

“When people think that ethics is just doing good and don’t look at the end result, they are selling it short as a strategic, cost-minimizing, wealth-maximizing process for achieving bottom-line results,” says the inaugural director of the Harry Susilo Institute for Ethics in a Global Economy, established in 2014 through an endowment in perpetuity from Indonesian businessman Susilo.

Hartman, who came to BU in July, is also a Questrom School of Business clinical professor of business ethics. She is charged with propagating ethics through the Questrom curriculum, establishing the institute as a player in ethics research and practice, and building bridges to counterparts in Asia and elsewhere. But her fundamental mission is to persuade people that doing good is smart business.

And she is not fond of phrases like “corporate social responsibility.”

“Never say the ‘R’ word,” she says. “It makes people not want to do it, because they think they have to. We have to demonstrate to corporations that they should be doing this for strategic reasons—because it works.”

Tell corporate executives it’s their duty to clean up the local park, she says, and they’ll say it’s not their responsibility. “But if their company cleans up the park and then puts up a sign saying ‘Parents, that park was full of dirty needles and cigarette butts and broken glass, and the corporation cleaned that up for you,’ then the neighbors are going to have good feelings about the company.” And when it tries to sell them, say, orange juice, that good feeling can turn into revenue.

“So you should do that and raise the price of orange juice by 50 cents. It’s strategic,” she says.

In January, Hartman will teach a class on ethical leadership in global business for second-year MBAs. Her plans include a morning of improv lessons to help students learn new ways to react to the fast pace of challenges in today’s economy with what she calls “ethical imagination.”

She hopes to be a positive resource for faculty as she works to integrate ethics more deeply into the Questrom curriculum at all levels. And part of that means simplifying a packed syllabus.

She tells of one busy colleague who described teaching a couple of ethics cases at the end of a course in Organizational Behavior. “I said, ‘I’m going to help you. Get rid of the ethics cases. You don’t need to teach them. Send me the OB cases, and I will help you create some questions around ethics in the OB cases you already teach.’”

The point, says Hartman, is that ethics is everywhere, so it should be taught that way. “I can find ethics in this piece of paper. How was it made? Where? What trees were cut down? Did any animals get displaced from those trees? Who did it? How much are they paid? Are they paid fairly? There are so many ethics issues in every case we teach. I can find ethics in anything.”

Even in the virtual world of FarmVille. From 2009 to 2012, Hartman was director of external partnerships for Zynga.org, the charitable arm of Zynga, the online game company founded and run by her brother, Mark Pincus, and home of FarmVille, Words with Friends, and other popular games.

In 2009, Hartman set up a microfinance operation for Zynga.org in Haiti, where she had worked on for-profit and nonprofit partnership projects in 2002. And after the country’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake, Zynga game players donated enough money to build an elementary school, Ecole de Choix, (School of Choice) in Mirebalais, 45 miles from Port-au-Prince. Choix, as it’s called, educates 200 children in grades one to six, most of them living in extreme poverty.

Although the Zynga.org connection ended with the construction, Hartman continues as board chair at the school, and she’s always looking for contributors. Her pitch comes back to that idea of ethics being the best kind of self-interest.

“Why give to a small school in the middle of Haiti?” she asks. “Because if we can help Haiti lead itself, then Haiti becomes less reliant on the rest of the world and becomes a player in the world economy, and we are all better off because of it. I can’t imagine a better reason to contribute.”

Hartman’s institute staff consists of a postdoc, a research assistant, and a doctoral research associate, who will help build students’ engagement with ethics outside of class through activities such as a lunchtime speaker series and a theater outing with a postshow discussion, still in the planning stages.

In one of Hartman’s first Susilo Institute efforts to reach outside the academic world, the institute created the Boston Regional Business Ethics Network, which held its inaugural meeting on October 2, bringing together academics and business people from around New England in the first of a quarterly series of exchanges.

Chicago native Hartman spent 25 years at DePaul University, where she was the Vincent de Paul Professor of Business Ethics at Driehaus College of Business. Much of that time, she was a visiting professor in places such as Melbourne Business School in Australia, HEC Paris, and Kedge Business School in France, where she holds a position as associated professor. At any moment, her conversation is likely to touch down in France or Vietnam or Haiti.

“I am gratified that we were able to attract an individual of Laura’s caliber and reputation,” says Kenneth W. Freeman, Allen Questrom Professor and Dean of the Questrom School of Business. “She brings extensive academic and industry experience, a strong background in ethics curricular integration, and she is well-known among her peers for integrity and inclusive leadership.”

In September, Hartman accompanied Freeman and Jonathan Lehrich (SED’16), Questrom’s associate dean for executive education and the institute’s administrative lead for global initiatives, to Singapore, where they met with Harry Susilo to work on plans for the institute’s conference Business Ethics in the Global Economy: East Meets West, to be held May 27 to 29 at Susilo’s Finna Golf & Country Club outside Surabaya, Indonesia. She also met with representatives from Singapore Management University and the Fudan University School of Management in Shanghai, hoping to create an academic collaboration network on business ethics with faculty from diverse cultures.

Susilo is founder and chairman of the Surabaya-based Sekar Group, comprising companies in the fisheries and food sectors, aquaculture, agriculture, trading, finance, and tourism, and chairman of a Singapore-based trading company.

“In providing resources to establish the Susilo Institute, I aspired to create a platform where we could all learn through sharing of diverse perspectives on business ethics from cultures around the world, starting with bridging the East and the West, and then moving beyond,” Susilo says.

Ask Hartman for an example of an East-West business issue and she’s quick to push play. “Most people in the West believe that Asia in general and China in particular have no respect for intellectual property rights, with pirated CDs and DVDs everywhere,” she says. “But the Chinese think the West is just greedy capitalists. Who are we to pull an idea out of the air and own it? They think we’re protective and territorial.”

Given these contrasting opinions on what’s ethical and what’s not, she says, “a better understanding is vital before we come to the table to discuss intellectual property rights.”