October 27, 2003
Students Reap the Benefits, Pay the Price, Of Business
Ethics Decisions
By Allison Anderson
|
MBA students who threw themselves into a highly original and speeded-up simulation of corporate life during the Plus program learned quickly about the bottom line implications of the dilemmas they may face upon graduation.
As managers, will they have to confront protesters angry at globalization? Tough judgment calls on cleaning up toxic pollution? Perhaps even the threat of terrorism against employees? The way students handled these tough issues during an intense, three-day simulation determined the winners of the Plus program’s Executive Challenge. Thanks to event sponsors Dell, H-E-B and Public Strategies Inc., the first place team won $11,000.
The Executive Challenge was the climax of a new ethics curriculum for all second-year McCombs MBA students, launched as an integral part of Plus, the school’s distinctive mid-semester professional development program.
Seminars and discussions kicked off the curriculum. Executives visited campus to share both their successes and struggles in some of the most challenging areas of the business world. Students broke into small groups to discuss how they might have behaved had they worked at organizations that stumbled, such as Monsanto, Enron, WorldCom or even the FBI.
“We have fashioned a curriculum that takes seriously the tension between long-term values and business performance,” said Plus Program Director Steven Tomlinson.
At the end of week two, discussions gave way to the Executive Challenge, an optional computerized competition created by Tomlinson with help from scriptwriters and interactive game designers. Students who entered the challenge teamed up into three fictional computer manufacturing companies. Team members played the roles of all typical corporate positions from CEO down to department managers.
Over three days of play, game designers threw one challenge after another at the companies. Students faced a concentrated array of fictionalized ethical-business challenges—a river contaminated with toxic PCBs, unlicensed software, sexual harassment cases, exploding batteries in customers’ laptop computers, and a terrorism threat to manufacturing facilities in Jakarta, Indonesia.
MBA ‘04 Troy Gedlinske, who expects to go into operations after graduation, served as director of manufacturing for the winning company of “Starr Computing.” He said his teammates who assumed executive roles made the most difficult yet interesting judgment calls in the game, which he described as fairly complex but also fun.
The fundamental goal of the fictional business teams was to come out financially ahead after three days of fast-moving simulated action where a fiscal quarter lasted less than an hour. But there was a catch. Pure profitability was not the only criteria for winning.
At what price good ethics?
Executives from Dell, H-E-B and Public Strategies Inc. served as both a board of directors and panel of judges during the challenge. They looked for solid operational and financial strategies, of course, but also an awareness that short-term decisions made during high-stress situations can irrevocably shape a company’s future.
“Your reputation is the greatest thing you have,” said Jim Schneider, chief financial officer of Dell. He encouraged the future managers to look further ahead than quarterly financial reports. He said decisions that save money in the short-term often cost more later, in terms of lawsuits and damage to company image.
The CEO of the winning team, Vincent Dolan, said the game forced students to face the consequences, for example, of a decision to evacuate their American employees from Jakarta. Another tough call involved whether to pay for the cleanup of waterways that may or may not have been contaminated by the company.
Starr Computing’s decision to evacuate the threatened Jakarta plant ultimately proved decisive. While the company actually came in second in terms of profitability, judges felt that they made the right call on the plant in terms of the long-term health of the company. Near the conclusion of the game, one team that did not evacuate was stunned and devastated by a (simulated) terrorist explosion that killed 300 Indonesian employees.
Dolan attributed Starr Computing’s victory to the team’s consistency in approaching problems thrown at them during play.
“It was a great opportunity to mix the business side and the ethics side,” Dolan said. “It’s easy to sit in a classroom and say you would just spend the money. This was the first time you had a repercussion monetarily.”
The immediate repercussion for members of the Starr Computing team will be almost $400 in their pockets. Dolan said the 28 company employees will share evenly in the $11,000 prize money.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
