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O Fortuna! Medieval conduct texts, the collapse of Enron, and a call for a revolution in management education

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1744935907078724

1744-9367

Ann Rippin, Peter Fleming,

Management Theory and Practice

Abstract This article takes as its starting point the derivation of the word ‘revolution’ from the Latin word revolvere, and its original sense of ‘to revolve, roll back’.This links, etymologically, the concept of overturning the status quo with the image of a wheel. From Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, written at the end of the Roman Empire, until the early modern period, Fortune’s Wheel was the ubiquitous image of the mutability of this sublunary world. A major theme in Boethius was the need to accept failure as inevitable, to learn from it, and so to grow morally and spiritually, since at the height of Fortune’s Wheel disaster beckons. This message was passed on to the conduct literature – the Mirrors for Princes – of the Middle Ages. Machiavelli’s Prince turned this ancient tradition on its head, by claiming that the true leader could conquer Fortune and halt her wheel. The most celebrated, most spectacular fall from grace in recent business and management history is the case of Enron. By examining the popular accounts of the company’s collapse it is possible to see what moral we are supposed to draw from the case.The paper considers who learned what at Enron: the wider business community, the majority of the employees and the principals. As Enron was a prodigious employer of MBA graduates, and as the story of the collapse has become an iconic teaching case, the paper goes on to consider what management students can expect to learn in contemporary schools of business and management by looking at some of the most influential texts on management development curricula. It finds a notable absence of any pedagogy of failure and concludes that for business schools to include an account of failure in their curricula would require a second kind of revolution, one in which success is not seen as a certainty and a stable state, but as an uncertain and possibly fleeting one for which business educators have a duty to prepare their students: taking their cue from Boethius rather than Machiavelli.