Sarbanes-Oxley was supposed to make it harder for executives to commit financial crimes. And yet, despite the passage of the 2002 law, we've seen a raft of questionable activities and decisions: The options scandals, a ton of Ponzi schemes (granted by companies not required to comply), a hike in foreign corruption cases and possibly law-breaking conduct by financial services firms (many with investigations still underway).  

It's fair to say that Sarbanes-Oxley wasn't designed to prevent the type of executive decisions that resulted in the massive credit bubble bursting, which helped usher in a deep recession. But it's also fair to say that it was designed to focus executives more on ethics and taking personal responsibility. One issue, not to sound anti-capitalist here, is that the moral system that undergirds publicly traded companies seems to work against the society at large in some ways. I recall a quote from the infamous, now jailed Jeff Skilling long ago; when asked about morality, he responded that his only moral was to get the stock price up. If you ponder that, you just might find it shocking. Certainly, you can justify a lot when the stock dictates all, and many executives share his sentiment. 

Here's a modest proposal: A "Hippocratic oath of business" that professional managers would abide by. One Thunderbird professor notes on the HBR site, "Management practice could be enhanced--and the odds of another systematic business failure could be reduced--if it were taught and treated as a true professional discipline, like medicine or law." Business schools are an obvious place to start this sort of movement. To an extent, you could argue that management has been professionalized already. Your MBA is your proof that you've been trained. 

It would be hard to argue with Thunderbird's move to create a Professional Oath of honor that was "then incorporated into the admissions process, the curriculum and all graduation ceremonies." But perhaps the key agent that could make an oath of this sort stick are company boards. They would certainly send a strong message by making executives sign such an oath, repeat it publicly and make a show of it. 

To many, this will sound like a big PR event. And they would be right in some cases. The fact is you cannot legislate morals and ethics; bad actors will always abound. But if anything it will force executives to think about a morality that extends into society and that may be a kind of deterrent--in theory anyway. - Jim