Honesty & Business Ethics

Week 3:

The Formula for Success and Happiness:
One’s still the same, get up early. Two the same work hard. Three get your education, get trained. Four so you can find your oil. Five, so you can make your mark. Six so you can get prepared to serve or give back.

• Integrity is the foundational virtue upon which all other virtues are dependant. It is the first rung on the character ladder. Where there is integrity, other virtues will follow. Where there is no integrity, other virtues have no chance of developing.

1. Decide today, once and for all, that you will be worthy of trust

2. Have faith that the Lord can and will help you, and then diligently seek His help.

3. Make covenants and keep them. 

5. Expect your integrity to be challenged. 

...count on the fact that your integrity will be tested. It will be tested in ways large and small. This is actually a blessing, for you don’t really know what you believe until your beliefs are tested....know that every time we choose to be obedient, every time we make a tough but righteous choice, our integrity is fortified.

6. Don’t give up. 

7. Covenant–or perhaps I should say, renew your covenant–with our Father and His Son to do what you came here to do. 

The Top 10 Must Haves For a Start Up

#10, the first thing you need is comfortable cheap furniture.

Number nine, put up a sign.

The next thing you need is too little money....So growth and ideas, in my opinion, they happen the best at very lean companies.

The next thing you need is common sense. 

You need the pride of a fat baby.

REMEMBER: In class discussions, participants bring to bear their expertise, experience, observations, analyses, and rules of thumb...Perhaps the most important benefit of using cases is that they help managers learn how to determine what the real problem1 is 

and to ask the right questions:

 Who is the protagonist? 

• What are his or her objectives (implicit or explicit)? 

• What decisions (implicit or explicit) must I make? 

• What problems, opportunities and risks do I, as the protagonist, face? 

• What evidence do I have to help make the decision? Is the evidence reliable and unbiased? Can I improve it? 

• What alternative courses of action are available? 

• What criteria should I use to judge the alternatives? 

• What action should I take? 

• How should I convince others in the case and in the classroom that my approach is best? 

• What did I learn from this case? 

• How does it relate to past cases and my own “live” experiences? 

How You Can Get the Most Out of the Process: 

1. Prepare. 3. Note the key problems or issues on a pad of paper. Then go through the case again. 4. Sort out the relevant considerations for each problem area. 5. Do appropriate qualitative and quantitative analysis. 6. Develop a set of recommendations, supported by your analysis of the case data.

2. Discuss the cases with others beforehand. As mentioned earlier, this will refine your reasoning. It's not cheating; it's encouraged. However, you'll be cheating yourself if you don't prepare thoroughly before such discussions. 

3. Participate. In case discussions, when you express your views to others you commit which, in turn, gets you involved. This is exactly the same as betting at the racetrack; your bet is a commitment which gets you involved in the race. Talking forces you to decide; you can no longer hedge. 

4. Share your related experience. During class if you are aware of a situation that relates to the topic being discussed and it would enrich the discussion, tell about it. So-called war stories heighten the relevance of the topic. 

5. Constantly relate the topic and case at hand to your business no matter how remote the connection seems at first. Don’t tune out because of a possible disconnect. You can learn a lot about marketing insurance by studying a case on marketing razor blades and vice versa. It’s not whether it relates, but how. 

6. Actively apply what you are learning to your own, specific management situations, past and future. That will greatly heighten relevance. Even better is to pick a situation that you know you will face in the future where you could productively use some good ideas. For example, how can I grow my business? Make note of each good idea from the discussion that helps. Not only will these ideas improve the outcome of the situation, they will stick in your mind forever, because they were learned in the context of something important to you. 

7. Note what clicks. Different people with different backgrounds, experiences, skills and styles will take different things out of the discussions. Your notes will appropriately be quite different from your neighbors’. 

8. Mix it up. Use the discussion as an opportunity to discover intriguing people with different points of view. Get to know them outside of class and continue your learning there. 

9. Try to better understand and enhance your own management style. By hearing so many other approaches to a given situation you will be exposed to many styles and thereby understand your own. This understanding will put you in a better position to improve it.