American culture and the 2008 financial crisis

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to trace the cultural roots of the presently ongoing crisis.

Design/methodology/approach
– The approach is to collect rankings of perceived goals of business leaders in 17 countries, from their employees who are attending evening MBA courses.

Findings
– There are marked differences in goal ranking between countries; overall ranking across countries follows the US model, but with exceptions.

Research limitations/implications
– Data collection was between 1995 and 2002 and analysis is based on judgment of evening MBA students with day jobs.

Practical implications
– This paper explains the present financial crisis from a hypertrophy of US cultural goals: growth, greed, and short‐term gains.

Originality/value
– The paper illustrates the unusual but credible data source from which the crisis could have been predicted.