A few years ago, I suffered a crisis of faith. After working in the field of business ethics at Harvard Business School and later as a consultant on global MBA education, I began to wonder if it was even ethical to try to teach the subject.

I laboured to persuade faculty to raise the topic, but then, the conversation typically went as follows: some students argued we should all “do the right thing”. These individuals typically broke into two groups: those who were saying what they thought was expected and those who really wanted to believe they could be ethical business people.

And then there was another group who felt the class was an exercise in political correctness. What did it have to do with learning how to be successful? They were cynical and sometimes slightly resentful; what right did a business school have to be preaching at them?