1. MBA students actually cheat in the classroom more than graduate students from other disciplines. A. True or B. False

2. According to the article, front porches represent a time and place where private interests could be weighed against public interests in a relaxed atmosphere where formal relationships and the stress of busyness were absent. A. True or B. False

3. The authors note that leaders do not have the time to deal with the full complexity of organizations, so they create a pragmatic simplification built on assumptions that effectively eliminate information that they perceive to be unnecessary. A. True or B. False

Reading to questions -The View from the Front Porch

Our premise is that business education and its reinforcement in business practice creates a physical stage for work performance that is too small for the feelings and spiritual context that seed our values to be fully appreciated. This physical stage empowers a management mindset embracing the eye of the economist/scientist to the exclusion of the mystic, artist, and poet. CTCs are the new stage for leadership work they provide front porches as respite from our busyness. The good news is that these front porches are becoming bottom-line rational as the strategic demands for innovation, creativity, and continuous learning grow. Trust, justice, and civility are necessary to meet these new strategic demands. It has been, and will continue to become, increasingly clear that value creation is directly linked to the quality of relationships necessary to support mutual learning and creativity. To break free of the physical stage to accomplish this transformation future leaders will need to awaken to a more complex view of organizational reality that naturally appreciates relationships, meaning and purpose in work, and the importance of ethical behavior in sustainable performance.

The point is that there is now a convergence of possibilities that might lead to linking knowledge and behavior that has not existed in the past. Adult value systems can be affected in the classroom, but not if the approaches are purely intellectual or academic. Business education might be too narrowly focused on the economist/scientist mindset and learning how to play the game of business on the physical stage to realize this possibility. But even if the context general business education provides is broadened and deepened, and the ethics classroom embraces CTC approaches to focus on mindsets as well as knowledge, there is still the challenge of creating work cultures that rationally legitimize front porches. This is leadership work, not management work. The challenge is to re-envision leadership work to see the leader as the steward of relationships and the subtle values that support them, not the source and controller of ideas. In the metaphor of a gardener, the new leader is soil tender, not seed planter. Leaders are stewards of the things that really count in our lives, but we do not know how to count. The new leader must be the embodiment of our morals and ethics, and this requires them to see organizational reality from the front porch.

Both business schools and organizational training efforts would be better served by collaboratively focusing on developing this new leadership mindset that fully embraces the complexity of human beings performing on the social and spiritual stage. There is now a window of opportunity to enrich the link between ethics knowledge and ethical behavior because the currency of relationships is more directly convertible into the currency of financial statements. It makes intellectual sense to focus on the softer relational issues that define ethical dilemmas. But can universities break free of existing educational models that are too narrow to include the mindsets of the mystic, artist, and poet? And can corporations break free of their busyness to rationalize front porches? Given the budget challenges facing business schools and corporations, and the mutual financial feedback loop they both support to serve their own physical stage interests, the answers to these questions is not encouraging. But the costs of supporting the illusion of a static, simplistic physical stage view of organizations in the face of an increasingly complex reality will at some point be too much to absorb. These costs are not just financial, but also spiritual and ethical. At stake is how we chose to be as individuals and as communities. From the front porch we can clearly see that businesses exist to serve society, not the other way around. Human beings are social and spiritual creatures, ultimately not slaves to the physical stage game. Business schools and businesses must change but they cannot do it in isolation. Now more than ever we need front porches on which the academic and practitioner community can engage in CTCs to encourage a transformation of mindsets that can and must catalyze leadership behavior based on strong morel/ethical foundations. These front porches are beginning to emerge.