Reframing business ethics in the management education curriculum

Abstract

The Cretan Minotaur of Greek mythology was a raging monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man. It represented uncontrollable lusts and powerful egoistic expressions in humankind. King Minos built a huge and complicated underground labyrinth-prison for the deadly Minotaur to dwell in. This maze of chambers was so complex that it was impossible to escape without help. In the tragedies of the 2008 financial crisis, the senior management of Lehman Brothers have been cast as players in The Devil's Casino, the title of Vicky Ward's book of the Lehman Brothers story (Ward 2010). The Lehman Minotaur was ultimately destroyed by its egoism and greed with the weak U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) playing the part of the weak King Minos feeding the financial flows to satisfy the monster's ravenous appetite. In his account of the Madoff Ponzi scheme, Harry Markopolis describes how for years he observed and experienced the SEC protecting large perpetrators of abuse at the expense of the investors whom the SEC is supposed to protect⋯ when it comes to large corporations and institutionalised Wall Street, the SEC uses kid gloves⋯ (Markopolis 2010, p. x).