Deceptively Viking-Sounding Event Names, and the Aimless Blog Entries That They Inspire

I remember one of the very first times I talked to Claire, we talked about the type of environment we'd create if we ran an office. I don't remember entirely what I said (or why we were even talking about it), but, knowing my tendencies, it involved something about "creating a culture of fear and deception," and Claire responded with "I'd create a culture of sexual harrassment."

Now that I've had some time to think about it, I suppose I should have responded with "combine those two and you've got the Catholic Church!"

Enron?

Anyway.

I attended a seminar at school today labeled on the school calendar as "Mandatory Interactive Business Ethics Experience." As we filter into the conference center for the whathaveyou, we find out that this specific program is called Eagle's Flight Council Of The Marble Star. What the....

Don't believe me? Believe it now.

Now, this exercise had little to do eith ethics and everything to do with a room full of apathetic MBA students. Each of twelve teams exchanged various types of currency and started the game with various pieces of information about other teams, and through the flow of information and the barter system, teams were supposed to trade their resources to obtain the most points after one hour. Right now, it sounds more like Monopoly, without the free parking and frustration. There was no glory to be won, though we did find out later that the four winning teams received "authentic" pewter amulets (again, no joke). We all represented "villages" with names like BowMaster, IronFist, and... I don't really remember the rest of them. UnicornHoof?

We then broke into groups and discussed a case a recent MBA grad who joined Delloite Consulting and took some liberties with her company credit card (at least, that's as best I can describe it in 20 words or less). She did things like unilaterally upgrade her plane tickets and stay at the Ritz on a business trip to Omaha, as well as order movies and wine through room service, and then bill this all back to the company.

First aside: I'd totally do stuff like that, and I'd certainly allow it from my employees once I get some employees, though I wouldn't ever subject them to Omaha.

This whole "program," from the curiously-named simplistic role-playing game to a discussion of whether United or USAirways is nicer- barely even touched on the idea of ethics. When you talk about ethics, shouldn't you approach ideas such as, I don't know, topics that relate to the existence of the Better Business Bureau? Or OSHA? Or the ACLU? Or all the various unions and professional societies? Shouldn't we talk about lying to shareholders or insider trading or stealing trade secrets or falsely advertising a product?

At this point, I've entirely forgotten where I planned to go with this. I think I was going to create an ethics quiz, but at this point I'm already thinking about a movie involving a bunch of knights fighting over a pewter amulet, so the ethics quiz will consist entirely of one question suggested to me my a friend of mine from San Francisco studying for his accounting ethics exam:

You find a roll of bling on da streetz - what goes down?

a) keep da $$
b) returnz

I think a better ethics lesson for us would have been to simply slap a picture of Ken Lay or Bernie Ebers on the wall of every classrom in the building with a big LOL on their face.