Memo #2
Date: February 6, 2006

1. The field has changed somewhat since my last memo. For details, see www.ethicsandbusiness.org/students2.htm.

2. After consulting with the MBA/graduate teams coming from out of town about some of the difficulties they were facing, we've decided on the following schedule change in the hope that this will make things easier for them. We'll schedule all of the out-of-town teams (graduate and undergraduate) on Friday, and we'll schedule all of the teams from southern California for Thursday (whatever time works for the team). This includes: Cal Poly Pomona, Concordia Irvine, LMU, USC and Vanguard. (San Diego and San Luis Obispo are far enough away from Los Angeles, that it makes sense to schedule them for Friday.) If this poses any unsurmountable obstacles for the teams from southern California, please let me know.

3. Please note that there is now a link for "travel and lodging information" on the website. As I note on the site, in the past, LMU has covered the cost of car rental. However, we're still uncertain about whether we can do this across the board for 2006 because we don't have a response yet to a major funding request. In the meantime, if this expense is an issue, please include it in a request for travel assistance.

4. Please remember that requests for travel assistance are due by Feburary 15.

5. Please keep in mind my comment about topics from the last memo. "From 2003 to 2005, a number of teams chose topics that were more closely related to 'ethics and economics' or 'ethics and public policy' than to 'business ethics.' Accordingly, for 2006, we're asking teams to choose topics related directly to an issue faced by a company or industry with the following exception. Because the point of the competition is to encourage students to work on ethical issues connected with their future professional lives, it seems to make sense to give the service academies greater latitude and to allow them to work on issues that are more closely related to "organizational ethics" than "business ethics," strictly speaking."

6. A recent conversation with some of our corporate judges about how best to talk about ethics in a business context has led to the following advice. Please remind your students that the audience should be seen as business executives, so any technical issues should be "translated," as it were, into common sense terms and everyday language. Thus, references to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Bentham, Mill, Kant, Rawls, utilitarianism, deontological and teleological considerations, and the like should be avoided.

7. In recognition of the fact that teams that don't advance to Saturday night might lose interest, we're working on some sort of ancillary competition for Saturday afternoon. I'll provide more details as they develop.

8. I'll post copies of this memo and memo #1 on www.ethicsandbusiness.org/students2.htm.

Thanks,

Tom White