THE new dean of the National University of Singapore Business School wants to produce ethical and socially responsible practitioners who understand the world and bring value to what they do.
Yes, Professor Bernard Yeung is well aware that the throngs who apply to study business do it largely to land plum jobs and fat salaries in the finance industry.
Applications for business and business-related courses such as accountancy and economics in local universities in the last three years bear this out; they have consistently been the top picks of A-level and polytechnic students.
For that, Prof Yeung says the market has to take some of the blame.
'Would you agree that banks are paying people too much without thinking about what they can produce?' he asks.
He finds it outrageous that finance executives in the United States are earning millions, and adds that the current crisis is, in large part, driven by collective greed.
Indeed, The Associated Press reported that in 2007, US$1.6 billion (S$2.4 billion) in bonuses was paid to top executives of more than a hundred banks and companies which later received bailout funds from the US government.
That is why the don looks for more than just the As or Bs which are almost mandatory for business courses these days when he interviews students. He says the right attitude is equally, if not more, important.
Students need to know what they are getting into.
'So you want to be an investment banker? Do you know what the career entails?' he says.
'It's not just about making money. We don't want to train students who say: 'I know how to network, I'm pretty and I can talk.' At the end of the day, you will only end up with a lot of students like those Lehman Brothers bankers.'
Instead, he wants students to ask themselves these questions: 'What am I doing? What is my career about? What value do I create and what value can I bring to the table?'
In his book, value should be the driving force in business.
He explains why. 'The top guns, the really good ones, on Wall Street or anywhere else always start with a value proposition.
'Henry Ford's mission statement was to produce cars that ordinary people can afford. It was a noble proposition and it transformed the world.
'A banker who just wants to earn another per cent in interest from you is not a real banker, he's a loan shark.
'A real banker is one who says: 'If I can bring someone with no ideas but with money to someone with no money but has ideas, and make both sides happy, then my mission is complete.'
It is a noble ideal, but Prof Yeung hopes the NUS Business School will equip its students with a framework 'that is correct and useful' so that they will not go the way of Bernard Madoff.
The former chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange and founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC was charged last month with swindling thousands of investors to the tune of US$50 billion, in what was possibly the world's biggest case of securities fraud.
There are three lessons the don says every business student in his school will do well to heed.
First, never forget the basics. 'Understand what you are doing, understand the world, understand the value proposition you are bringing to the table.'
Next, understand the connection between action and consequences. And finally, he says, always respect history.
He says it is not the first time lax corporate governance and misguided economic policies have caused banks and companies to crash and burn. It will not be the last either.
'We really need to respect history. All these mistakes keep happening. If we go back to history, we will learn,' he says.
The fourth of five children born to a poor Hong Kong family, Prof Yeung - who has a PhD from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (now called the Chicago Booth School of Business) - is a self-made man who financed his own education through scholarships and part-time work including menial labour.
He says his father - a general worker who worked two jobs to support his family - taught him a lot about ethics, something he never tires of emphasising.
'When we were young, we were always hungry. One day, an Indonesian businessman came visiting, and brought a box of pork jerky.'
Being the greedy one, he ran to open the box when the man left and found a thick wad of notes inside.
'When my father saw it, he grabbed it, ran after the man and returned it. We were poor but he was very ethical and straight.'
He says it is a virtue which will serve one well in life.
Grinning, he lets on: 'If I had my way, the students here would learn about values, ethics and social responsibility from Day One.
'Instead of running beauty pageants during orientation, let's think about social entrepreneurship or business planning competitions.
'We should have a beauty pageant of the mind which brings social value instead of Mr and Miss Beach.'
Relevance and value
HE DESCRIBES a good business school as one which takes the value proposition it offers students very seriously.
Prof Yeung, who has won many prizes and published countless papers in respected publications such as Journal Of International Business Studies and Journal Of Financial Economics, says: 'If I go into a classroom, I have to ask myself: 'What is the market value of what I am going to teach them? Will I give something that would allow them to think independently?'
He continues: 'You can't just teach them what you want to teach because if what you teach is not relevant, the students - especially those in executive programmes - will walk out on you.'
He highlights several recent programmes as examples of how the business school takes prides in relevance and value.
In October, Prof Yeung and members of his faculty wrote a series of articles explaining the current crisis for The Straits Times. The articles have since been compiled into a book, Financial Crisis 2008, which was launched last Saturday.
The following month, the school produced a course called Economic Crisis 2008. Prof Yeung delivered the first lecture for the programme which attracted nearly 200 students.
'We felt a sense of urgency and social responsibility to empower our students with knowledge. If you understand, you will not fear,' says the don, adding that his faculty is currently working on a book on globalisation.
Social responsibility is a word he uses often.
'We are social animals and we should care for the collective good. And because we are social animals, there's also a lot of symbiosis between us. We have to contribute,' he says.
However, he doesn't believe in shoving the concept down people's throats.
'You need to back up with concrete evidence and analysis why it benefits everybody,' he says.
Prof Yeung once wrote a paper on how practising corporate social responsibility helps a company's bottom line too.
Comparing the financials of several German and Chinese multinational outfits operating in China where anti-pollution laws are lax, he proved that environmentally friendly companies get higher value for their investments.
The German companies in China have healthier bottom lines because using the same environmentally friendly machines as their parent companies is not only more cost-effective, it also allows easier adoption of new technology.
Prof Yeung points out that coming up with programmes and courses to help students understand the financial crisis is also an exercise in social responsibility.
It shows that the faculty is agile and proactive, virtues which the don hopes will be synonymous with the school.
It's not about rankings
WHILE he is pleased that the NUS Business School recently moved up five places to 89th in the latest ranking of full-time MBA programmes worldwide by the Economist Intelligence Unit, he says his most immediate task is to help it develop the personality and characteristics of the world's best institutions.
'If you go to Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge, what you see is an intellectual curiosity, an integrity and a drive for excellence.
'It's not about your ranking or whether your paper gets published in this or that journal. It's about a holistic devotion to scholarship, whether it's teaching or research, or serving society,' he says.
Prof Yeung says while the NUS Business School has pockets of excellence, it will take a few years before it ranks with the likes of Harvard or Cambridge. Among Asian universities, he says NUS is among the top in 'intellectual intensity'. But there is no reason why it cannot scale even greater heights in academic excellence.
After all, he says Singapore is an economic miracle with a gross domestic product (GDP) higher than that of many European countries, including Britain.
'If we can do this economically, we definitely can do this in academia. We just need to raise standards in research and teaching, and have more self-confidence that we can do the right thing. We will get there,' he says reassuringly.
He welcomes competition from other local institutions such as the Singapore Management University and Nanyang Technological University, as well as foreign ones like Insead.
'It's good to have a menu of choice for Singaporeans. I just hope that it will not cheapen our education to a numbers game.'
He explains: 'While we compete for students, we have to be careful not to sweet-talk and overpromise. Don't inflate salaries, don't tell them they can get a double degree in a short time. They are our new generation, we cannot prey on their lack of information.'
kimhoh@sph.com.sg
What he asks for from his faculty
'That they do not hide behind algebra and statistics. That they can translate an academic paper into simple English so that even my daughter, who is 16, can understand it.'
On the qualities of an excellent academic
'True academics do not just close the door. They always ask if their work is useful and relevant to the real world. True academics raise the questions before problems even emerge.'
On Generation Y
'They have a lot more choices and they fully understand what these are.
Having grown up with the Internet, they expect things to be instantaneous.
They are not dumber or more selfish. This is not a generation to which you can preach. You need to approach them with intelligence and understanding.'
The business dean
PROFESSOR Bernard Yeung, 55, became the dean of the NUS Business School last August.
Before that, he was the Krasnoff Professor in Global Economics and Strategy/Management at New York University's Stern School of Business.
The Hong Kong-born Canadian received his MBA and PhD from the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business and was instrumental in setting up a campus for NYU in China.
He is married to Jean, a sociologist who teaches at the National University of Singapore. The couple have a son, 21, who is studying political science at NYU, and a daughter, 16, a student at the Singapore American School.
