10 March 2005

More odds and ends.

1. I've been communicating with a few teams about topics, and I thought it might help if I simply sent this note to everyone. The place to start is that the competition is designed to put students in a situation equivalent to one they'd face in business if they were put on a task force that's asked to research the financial, legal and ethical dimensions of a particular problem that a specific company is facing and then to make a recommendation about how the company should handle it. A good set-up for this is for the team to assume that it's a group of consultants--either internal or external to the company--and they'll be making their presentation to the senior management of the company. One of the major challenges in this sort of situation is to balance the various concerns (financial, legal and ethical). We've found that this sort of set-up makes it easier to recognize the competing pressures, it ensures that all of the bases are covered, it keeps things focused properly and it makes it easier for the judges to evaluate the effectiveness of the presentation.

2. In the same spirit--thinking of what it would be like to operate in a corporate setting--we strongly encourage teams to find a way to talk about the ethical issues in a way that would be most effective in such a setting. Accordingly, we'd ask teams to bear in mind that it's unlikely that you'd hear any of the following words in a business discussion involving ethics: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Bentham, Mill, Rawls, natural law, deontological, teleological, and the like. Ethics is more likely to be approached through reference to corporate mission statements and statements of corporate values, which then make it easier to bring up basic ethical issues of whether people are being harmed, whether people are being treated appropriately, etc. Most companies now have these statements. If the company the team's working on doesn't, teams can obviously suggest such a statement as part of their solution, and they can use their proposed statement as part of their argument. If teams are coming up with a fictitious company, they may as well create a fictitious code.

3. By March 31, we'd like to receive the following from each team.

*A one-page (or longer, if the team wants) handout that includes the names of the team members, the team's "business identity," the judges' "business identity," an executive summary of the team's argument (not simply a description of the topics the presentaiton will cover), and an outline of the presentation that identifies which speaker handles which topic. We'll prepare a booklet that will be available to everyone at the competition.

*Copies of any Powerpoint shows. We want to load them ahead of time into the computers that we'll be using. If a team brings a revised version, we'll try to load that, but we've sometimes run into technical glitches that prevent this. At least this way, we know the team will have something that works. Please advise teams to have a low-tech backup plan, such as transparencies, just in case the system crashes.

*Race forms for anyone (student or faculty) planning to participate on Saturday morning. Please print out the form at http://www.ethicsandbusiness.org/run/entryform_2006-Biathlon.pdf, have each person fill one out and sign it, and then please mail them to me (Thomas White, Center for Ethics and Business, Loyola Marymount University, 1 LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045). We need the forms by this date so that our race timing company can put coded entries into the data base so that we'll then be able to determine the winners on Saturday. I also need to receive the forms directly so that there's no charge for the entry. Teams or individuals missing the March 31st deadline are still welcome to do the run as our guest, but we won't be able to get them into the database for the biathlon calculations. Please mail rather than fax because faxed entry forms are sometimes impossible to read.

Copies of this and the earlier memos are available at www.ethicsandbusiness.org/students2.htm.

Thanks, Tom