Web Exclusive: Bob Massie - Finding His Place at HBS
“I owe a great deal to the late Professor John Matthews,” Bob Massie says, as he retraces his personal journey from undergraduate involvement in the South Africa divestment movement to graduate studies at Harvard Business School. “When I first visited the School, I was trying to figure out if there was a place for me. I was particularly interested in the DBA Program because I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn't sure I'd fit in. So Professor Bob Stobaugh of the Doctoral Program sent me over to see Matthews.”
Matthews, who taught at HBS for 42 years, was widely considered a pioneer in the field of business ethics and corporate responsibility. “He spoke with me for a long time and then very generously said he would work with me,” says Massie. “In describing me to Stobaugh afterwards, Matthews used words to the effect that I was a strange guy, but one who might add something to the School.”
The “strange guy” came to be considered the conscience of his first-year MBA classroom. It was a compliment Massie accepted with some reluctance — he wished that his fellow students would give voice in class to the ethical concerns they preferred to convey to him in private. As he would later write of his MBA experience, “I stuck to the role I had been granted as a liberal bellwether, a miner's canary that, as long as he didn't pipe up or keel over, certified that ethical boundaries were being respected.”
Massie was learning a lot, too — not only a greater comprehension of the business process and ethos, but also the managerial skills that have served him well as executive director of CERES (www.ceres.org). “I came to understand that I had a monolithic view of business and didn't understand the functions of marketing, say, or finance,” he says. “I became fascinated by it all and found that many of my prejudices were wrong. I also found that businesspeople and students were gung-ho, can-do folks whose attitude was, ‘Tell me the problem and we'll work together to fix it.' They weren't encumbered by a lot of the exhaustive self-doubt that you often find in other disciplines. That was surprising and appealing to me. HBS gave me much greater precision about motives, behavior, and issues with regard to business — what can be trusted and what should be looked at with skepticism.”
Massie recalls one of his HBS professors once joking that entrepreneurship is finding ways to do things that you want using other people's resources. “I identify in many ways with being an entrepreneur,” he says. “As an activist, that's sort of what you are.” He counts himself lucky to have been involved in some trends before they achieved critical mass, issues such as business ethics and the push for greater corporate transparency, for example. These are among the matters addressed by the recently launched Global Reporting Initiative (www.globalreporting.org), which Massie and CERES have been working on for years. “Everybody was talking about reporting, but something concrete needed to happen,” Massie says. “And with GRI, we're about to unveil some well-researched work on corporate governance issues, just as Enron has emerged. I feel like I've been a couple of steps ahead — as an entrepreneur, that's the best you can hope for.”
Indeed, Massie believes that today's headlines about lax corporate controls, conflicts of interest, and ethical shortcomings are really nothing new. “In the long view,” he says, “I see that American democracy, since its inception, has had to figure out how it relates to economic power and rethink that question repeatedly during the life of the republic, just as we are now doing. That's what the campaign finance bill is about, and that's what's sparking the confrontation over who was involved in the administration's energy-policy formulation. Those issues are fundamental because they relate to the question of what is the proper role for private economic power in the conduct of public work. I think the boundary's a little off right now, and that the world's changing rapidly. We need to change with it.”
And what precisely should be the larger goal of society? “I have come to believe,” Massie has written, “that the true test of greatness for any group of people — be they a family, a community, or a nation — is the manner in which they care for those suffering in their midst. Just as we judge parents on the way they educate and care for their children, and friends on their constancy and sensitivity, so should we judge society by the way it assists those who bear life's greatest burdens: the chronically ill, the poor, and the elderly. Our goal should be a society made up of people who are both individually and collectively compassionate.”
