Memo to the Class of ’09: A tough job market shouldn’t make B-school grads compromise on their ethics— now or at any point in their careers

Memo to the Class of ’09

http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca20090519_540128.htm

Many college graduates upon graduation will get a lot of advice on what to do when it comes to job selection; from parents and family members to friends and seginficiant others. But, as this article shows that people who are not entering this business job market are facing much hardship due to the fact that the people who’ve came before them have really messed up the market. Ethics are a huge issue in today business society and business men and stockbrokers are two of the least trusted jobs in the nation.

There are three main things that all students who are now entering the business world should do:

1) listen to the whispers

2) keep your promises

3) speak up!

If everyone who is now entering the real world would follow the three roles listen above there shouldn’t be much more dishonesty in the business world any longer. The big issue is that all the “new” people who are entering the world of the fast pace market are afraid to speak up, and tell people that they are doing something wrong; even if it’s your boss. There should be a line that we all must draw when its come to moral and ethical issues in the world of business. We seldom if ever speak up against wrong doings in today society and I believe that if all recent graduated speak up and follow the steps above that we should be on the right path to the rise of greater ethics in our nation today.

-K.A. Crout

The Ethics of Multitasking

http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/sep2009/ca2009094_935233.htm

Here’s why multitasking is unethical.

When you multitask, you’re doing a lot of work, but you’re not doing most (or any) of it well. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that people who fired off e-mails while talking on the phone and watching YouTube videos did each activity less well than those who focused on one thing at a time. Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell, author of CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! (Ballantine, 2006), puts it this way: “Multitasking is shifting focus from one task to another in rapid succession. It gives the illusion that we’re simultaneously tasking, but we’re really not. It’s like playing tennis with three balls.”

I believe that multitasking is something that we all do, but I don’t think its something that anyone has mastered properly. We all try to do a lot of things at once, but none of use give any of the task 100% of our effort. When I try to do a variety of tasks at once I tend to struggle more than if I would have just done one task at a time.

I believe that when some one try to multitask they try to take control of many situations at once, but I truly believe that they are just being controlled. The tasks are actually controlling them, they really have no control or organization of the tasks at hand.

Yes, I know it’s hard to put those devices away, even for a few moments. I’m not sure whether BlackBerrys and iPhones cause attention problems or simply make those who are susceptible more prone to them. It doesn’t help that everywhere we go, we’re surrounded by people who are absorbed in their electronic gadgets. What it comes down to is this: Are you controlling the technology, or is the technology controlling you?

So, I believe that we all should just take time to complete one task at a time in a timely, organized fashion. Its proven that if we just do one thing at a time our lives will be less stressed and in the end we will have more done in the end.

Spitzer’s Charges Face a Challenge

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16422-2005Apr26.html

“For more than three years now, New York Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer has been reshaping the financial services industry, forcing out players he considers bad apples and extracting billions of dollars in fines from mutual fund companies, stock analysts and others in the industry. But not, former Bank of America Corp. securities broker Sihpol is expected to take on Spitzer when he goes to trial today on 40 criminal charges for his role in helping a hedge fund place after-hours trades that Spitzer says are illegal. Sihpol is not the only one of Spitzer’s targets fighting back. Former New York Stock Exchange chief Dick Grasso is challenging Spitzer’s effort to make him return his $139.5 million in retirement compensation. But Sihpol’s case is the first to go before a jury, and, unlike Grasso, he is facing criminal charges.”

This article just showed me that when you are shady, it will all come back to haunt you. The main point I got out of this is that when one goes down, they all go down. The point being that, when one get caught– they all start telling on there friends who are doing something wrong in the financial industry.

“But Stewart and the defense team say things are not that clear. The Securities and Exchange Commission regulation in place at the time of the trade does not use the words 4 p.m. Rather it simply states that all mutual fund orders placed after a fund has computed its daily price must get the next day’s price. In practice, many funds do not calculate their daily price — called a net asset value — until nearly 5:30 p.m., although that calculation is based on the value of the funds’ component stocks, and those prices are set at the 4 p.m. market close.”

“There’s no statute that says 4 o’clock. There’s no manual that says 4 o’clock. This would be a very different case if there was,” Stewart said.

So, this is going to be a good case to see how all this plays out in the end. There are a lot of grey areas in this area and it going to be an interesting to see who wins this argument. I believe that there are some shady things going on with Bank of America, and I think that the head of the hedges department needs to pay the price for what he was doing with the mutual funds.

Wal-Mart Brazil Thinks Green

Wal-Mart Brazil Thinks Green 

I believe that this meeting is going to change the way big business is done around the world. This step that Wal-Mart took last week was historic. Wal-Mart knew that the ball was in their court, and something had to be done. They knew that if they took a step in the right direction that they would have many of their suppliers following right behind them.

 ”Wal-Mart Brazil managed to get twenty major suppliers onstage to sign an agreement to meet all these goals. On very short notice, the company corralled the presidents of Brazilian operations for major corporations such as, Cargill, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly and Clark , PepsiCo, P&G, Sara Lee. Twenty top executives stood on stage and signed these aggressive agreements.”

Who would have ever thought that Wal-Mart of all companies would have stood up and answered the toughest questions. I think that this was a very smart decision for a global empire like Wal-Mart; they have one of the largest target markets in the world. They touch more people in one day than some companies touch in a who year.

I think now that they have done this everyone will stop giving Wal-Mart so much “bad” ethical attention. It’s a fact now that Wal-Mart is trying to make this work a better place, and it is setting a new pace for corporate sustainability.

K. Crout

Steroids, Sports and the Ethics of Winning

Steroids, Sports and the Ethics of Winning

After reading this article entitled, “Steroids, Sports, and the Ethics of Winning” by Michael Billingham (team physician for the San Francisco 49er and Santa Clara University) it really opened my eyes to what our sports are coming down to in the 21st century.

Like Mr. Billingham, said

 ”Should athletes be allowed to make this trade-off? Many say, “It hurts only me, so why does society care?”"

Our society cares as a whole because we see the use of steroids as a form of cheating; and when you are cheating, you aren’t TRYING! The use of steroids in our society today is something we seem all to comfortable with. We can turn on ESPN and see another one of our childhood “hero’s” testing positive for Performance Enhancement Drugs (PED). So what message does that send out to todays youth? Is it ok?

If you asked most professional sports starts today, most of them would say that they all want a fair and equal chance to take there game to the next level. But, most of them wouldn’t think twice if the chance to get an edge over their competition presented itself.

But, when I say “sports stars”– I should be more clear who I am talking about because it today’s 21st century sports society we have everyone from high school athletes to multi-million dollar sports moguls taking these drugs.

“The conspirators in this are everywhere—coaches, institutions, even some parents. We see parents who are in complete denial when their kids—college athletes with eating disorders—have stress fractures of their tibias or patellas because their bones are fragile from anorexia. The parents are living through the children’s achievements, so it’s very difficult to break this pattern.”

There any even many kids out there that will do anything to the advantage over there friends. But, are the steroids users really winning? If you look at the facts it doesn’t look like that is the case at all. We have parents who knowly support (or act like they don’t know) their child using PED’s, we have coaches who don’t catch onto the fact that there star running back just gained 20lbs of  muscle in the off-season, and increased his bench press by 60lbs.

I just think that our society just needs to take a step back and look the path that America’s sports are going down. We are sending ourselves down a dark road to distruction, and at this rate there might be no turning back.