My Thoughts about The Case of the Million-Dollar Decision

I think Oswald should keep doing what he did which is modeling ethical leadership, keep practicing business with integrity and honesty instead of bribing Chinese officials. Even though bribing can gain more business to the company and be financially beneficial to the employees and shareholders, it will ruin the company’s reputation in a long run. If the company doesn’t have a good reputation, other people may don’t want to do business with Pegasus. As a CEO, he should think about what’s good for the company in a long run and be consistent about it.

BUS 600 week 2 ideas to share

Ideas I have learned from the chapters we have studied that I can use for my business or profession:

1.       Corporations have social responsibilities to do what’s good for the society except making profit. Organizations like Corporate Responsibility Group provide network for sharing information and promoting good practice. It’s also each individual’s responsibility to try to do the right thing for the society.

2.       Legal activities are not necessarily ethical. Even though child labor in a lot of countries like Indonesia and Malaysia is legal, it absolutely is not ethical.  

3.       Should companies practice business in other countries follow foreign law or US law? This is a popular ongoing debate. I guess the answer is it depends because there’s no standard answer for this question. My company has operations in over 40 countries. After studying chapter 2 about ethics, I am very interested in how my company practice business in different countries and which law it follows. I am going to find out more about it.

4.       There’s a system for everything. Foundation of business management class teaches us different aspects of business practice. It is essential to understand marketing, ethics, accounting, or Be, quan analysis, finance, operations, economics and strategy before starting a business. What we are going to learn at the class will give us a general concept of how to start a business, operate a business profitably and legally, and how to generate customers and profit. I think it might be the most important class in the whole MBA course.  

Personal expense vs. business expense, an ethical question

Every company has policy on business expenses either on its employee handbook or other written policy as guideline. Business people have business expenses like business meals, office supply, equipment, business communications (including phone bill, internet fee) and travel expenses (including airfare, personal mileage, hotel expenses, and meals). Marketing and Sales people who conduct business with external people and customers have the most expenses.  I think almost every business person and business entity faces the challenge of differentiating business expenses and personal expenses because sometimes there’s no fine line between business expense and personal expense. For example, if you meet for a former colleague and also a friend for lunch, is it a business lunch or personal lunch? Should it be paid by you or your company? I think business people especially marketing and sales people face this situation often should be able to make the right call and it’s important for us, MBA student to make the ethical decision from what we have learned at CAMLAT.

I think it takes two sides’ effort to make sure the company assets are not paid for personal expenses. We, as employee should try to make the ethical decision as possible and provide as detail as possible for business meals like listing of attendees, reason for business expenses.  If the conversation during lunch is more related to personal matters, the lunch should be considered as a personal lunch thus should be paid as personal expenses, same for meals that are more on a personal level between colleagues like potlucks, after work drinks and get-togethers. As the company, periodic auditing should be enforced. Is there’s a question raise regarding to a business expenses, it should be communicated to the employee as soon as possible.

My vision

I have a steady job at a high-tech firm and it keeps me really busy. MBA is not really required for my job. But why do I want to spend most of my weekends and evenings study to get a MBA? Because I have a goal, a dream. I want to start a company that sales organic tofu product. I want to learn how to start my business, analyze the market and make business strategy through the MBA course. Hopefully by the time the course ends, I will have enough knowledge to start a small business.

I love tofu for its taste. More and more Americans are realizing what a healthy food tofu is thus adding tofu on their dinner table. I think this market has great potential. I would like to start a company that sells all kind of organic tofu product to regular Americans, not just Asians. This is my vision and goal.