Giving Voice to Values Script free essay sample

The focus here is not on situations where we are tempted to do something we believe is wrong, for our own personal gain and because we believe we can get away with it. While this is a relevant topic, it is for another day. Now some might say that what we really want is to be able to feel like we have voiced and acted on our values. And this desire may lead us just as easily – perhaps more easily – to focus our energy on finding ways to rationalize what we say and do such that it appears consistent with our values, as opposed to focusing our energy on finding ways to actually be consistent with our values. Research on self-bias would tend to support this view. 1 Others might point out that the real problem in the starting assumption is the idea of voicing and acting on our values â€Å"effectively. † That is, given the organizational and personal barriers to acting on our values, success in this arena is elusive. We will write a custom essay sample on Giving Voice to Values Script or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Thus even if we don’t succumb to the selfjustifying bias noted above, many if not most of us will abandon attempts to follow our values simply because we don’t believe it is possible to do so2 We may believe that despite our David M. Messick and Max H. Bazerman, â€Å"Ethical Leadership and the Psychology of Decision Making,† Sloan Management Review, Winter 1996, Volume 37, Number 2, Reprint 3721, page 11. 2 â€Å"A 2003 study conducted by the Ethics Research Center uncovered that workers do not raise ethical issues on the job for two main reasons: 1) They fear personal retaliation; and 2) they are convinced that senior management won’t This material is part of the Giving Voice to Values curriculum collection, a collaboration between the Aspen Institute (www. AspenCBE. org) and The Yale School of Management. The Giving Voice to Values curriculum collection is in the Pilot Phase of development; do not distribute/reproduce without permission. 1 1 best efforts and courage, we will not be able to change the offending organizational practice or influence the offending individuals, especially if they are our superiors in the organization and/or if they appear to be in the majority. In addition, we may fear the price we would be forced to pay – anything from social disapproval to negative career consequences and/or financial and family disruptions. Certainly research on whistle-blowers suggests that they often suffer both personally and professionally. We all have seen, heard, or at least can imagine, stories of individuals who raised unpopular or uncomfortable questions and were subsequently seen as naive or less than committed to doing what it takes to succeed. 3 However, the type of action we are talking about here precedes, and hopefully makes unnecessary, external whistle-blowing. That is, we are talking about efforts to make change within an organization via problem re-definition, creative problem-solving, constructive engagement, persuasion, reasoning, personal example and leadership. And of course it is important not to underestimate how difficult it can be to even know what our own core values are, and whether or not a particular practice conflicts with them. As has been often pointed out by thoughtful people, ranging from ethicists to political scientists, many of the thorniest choices we face in our lives are less about right versus wrong decisions than about right versus right. If this were not the case, a consequentialist approach to ethics (weighing the relative costs and benefits of different actions) would be both easier to apply and much less necessary. As Robert Kane writes in Through the Moral Maze: The first of many confusions that people have about ethics concerns the value of thinking about it. Ethical argument is not primarily directed at those who are bent on doing evil. It is directed in the first instance not at bad people, but at good people whose convictions are being drained by intellectual and moral confusions. 4 Given all these objections to the very framing of our opening assumption here, it is important to clarify that this note is not about denying the tendency to rationalize in the service of selfjustification. Nor is it about downplaying the obstacles to effective action in the face of values conflicts, or about denying the risks. It is not even about avoiding the complexities involved in actually clarifying what actions best support our values. Rather this note is about acknowledging that nevertheless, some people do voice and act on their values, and do so effectively. This note is about recognizing that there is much to be learned from looking at how and why they do so. And this note is about noticing that they do so not simply in spite of each of the above objections, but also because of their sophisticated understanding of the objections themselves. That is, they make an effort to know themselves and to thus better understand others, diminishing the impact of self-justifying rationalizations. They do anything about an ethical problem once it is brought to their attention. † David Batstone, â€Å"Right Reality: You Cannot Train Employees to Be Ethical,† [emailprotected] com. 3 And once we have tried to raise issues internally, if unsuccessful, we may feel the need to take more public action. Robert Kane, Through the Moral Maze: Searching for Absolute Values in a Pluralistic World. M. E. Sharpe, 1996, p. 10. This material is part of the Giving Voice to Values curriculum collection, a collaboration between the Aspen Institute (www. AspenCBE. org) and The Yale School of Management. The Giving Voice to Values curriculum collection is in th e Pilot Phase of development; do not distribute/reproduce without permission. 2 think strategically about how to implement their values, thereby diminishing the risks they face; and when the risks are unavoidable, they view them clear-eyed and prepare themselves. After all, risk management is not always about avoiding risks; rather it is often about anticipating, preparing for and mitigating them. And they learn to communicate about values openly and clearly, thus ensuring that they have access to more and better information with which to make considered decisions. This note is about ways to think about and accomplish all of these things and so finally, this note is about acknowledging and enabling choice. The Origins of Giving Voice to Values The Aspen Institute Business and Society Program and Yale School of Management Giving Voice to Values initiative is a program of research and curriculum development designed to analyze and share the many ways that business practitioners can voice and implement their values in the face of countervailing pressures in the workplace. The approach to values born from this initiative and described in this note grows out of a rich set of inputs. As we will see in subsequent pages, the power and effectiveness of our efforts to voice and act on our values is often driven by the power and persuasiveness of the stories we tell about them. Therefore, let us begin by sharing the story of how the approach described here was born – both the personal story and the public story. First to the personal story. 5 When I started work at a business school – the Harvard Business School in the mid-1980s – I experienced culture shock. This was a time when even the student newspapers at business schools crowed that students would attempt a hostile takeover of their grandmothers if they could make a profit at it. I was fresh out of graduate school with a doctorate in the Humanities and nothing had prepared me for this new world. I was excited by the energy, the clarity of intention and the sheer logic of the place. It seemed the opposite of everything I had known. I would joke with my friends that when my fellow doctoral students in literature and film used to ask. â€Å"How are you? ,† I would be considered suspect – either shallow or ignorant – if I answered without the requisite level of angst, seasoned with knowing despair. At the business school, on the other hand, the accepted response to that greeting was â€Å"Great, just great! delivered in a firm and confident tone with direct eye contact and, preferably, accompanied with an energetic shake of one’s right arm and closed fist. What looking glass had I stumbled through? Business school and the corporate offices of senior executives I frequented as a researcher, case writer and eventually faculty member were halls of purposefulness and confidence. Whereas the test of intelligence had previously been the ability to take a s ingle passage of poetry or fiction and open it up, revealing multiple layers of meaning and nuance, the performance test here 5 Much of this section is drawn from â€Å"Is there free will in business? Leadership and social impact management† by Mary C. Gentile in Handbook of Responsible Leadership and Governance in Global Business, edited by Jonathan P. Doh and Stephen A. Stumpf, Edward Elgar Publishing Inc. , Northampton, MA, 2005, pp. 221-240. This material is part of the Giving Voice to Values curriculum collection, a collaboration between the Aspen Institute (www. AspenCBE. org) and The Yale School of Management. The Giving Voice to Values curriculum collection is in the Pilot Phase of development; do not distribute/reproduce without permission. 3 eemed to be the ability to define a problem so precisely and cleanly that all irrelevancy fell away and one was left with a clearly solvable equation or a single principle to optimize. It was a beautiful and heady world, albeit one to which I was unaccustomed. Twenty years after my introduction to that world, we live in a time when the once astonishing MA deals of the eighties are surpassed and even dwarfed on a regular basis and when CEOs, having risen to the status of popular heroes in the late 1990s, face heightened public scrutiny as a result of the widely publicized and stunning excesses and abuses of the early 2000s. But despite this fall from grace, the belief in the power and the efficacy of business has not diminished; rather, it is the public’s trust in the business agenda and its methods that has been tarnished. In fact, the degree of public and government scrutiny and even cynicism that business and its leaders encounter today is a direct reflection of the amount of power, control and capacity they are believed to wield. This brings us to a fundamental irony about leadership in this arena. Business leaders and aspiring business leaders in free market contexts are attracted to the potential to make an impact, to build something tangible, to manage and control an enterprise and, of course, to make money. This is a world of â€Å"can do† attitudes, of belief in the individual’s capacity to make a difference by sheer dint of talent and hard work. And yet, when it comes to the arena of social impacts and ethical action, these business practitioners all too often protest that their hands are tied. When it comes to running their business in a manner that explicitly serves society, both through the value it creates and also the values it preserves, they often appear to believe that the market prevents them from doing as much as they might wish. I find myself wondering how the arena of free market capitalism, so steeped in the orthodoxy of individualism and a belief in the mastery of one’s own fate, can be so constrained? Is there free will in business? The Giving Voice to Values initiative is a response to this irony. Moving from the personal story, let us consider some of the other inputs to this work. In 2001 and 2002, the Aspen Institute conducted a survey of MBA student attitudes regarding the role of business in wider society. When asked whether they expected they would have to make business decisions that conflicted with their personal values during their careers, half the respondents in 2002 (and more than half in 2001) believed that they would. The vast majority of respondents both years reported it would be â€Å"very likely† or â€Å"somewhat likely† that they would experience this as stressful.

Free Essays on Search For Order

Search for Order from 1877-1916 During the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s the United States had a great undertaking of finding order. Order, in the general term of life, both on the personal aspects and the country as a whole had been disassembled during the civil war and the events that occurred shortly there after. This paper is to illustrate how Americans executed the search for order, in the broad sense of the word. There will be three points brought to light to support the claim of order, the aspects of Economic, Social, and Cultural. ECONOMIC Economic stability and equal opportunity define the search for economic order for each and every American. During the time in question, there was very little economic order. Those Americans that were lucky enough to join the steel/cattle/ and other industries that were thriving in the early 19th Century were set for life, vs. the immigrants that just started to see American soil and work here for the first time. There was a huge contrast in wages, the wealth wasn’t spread very even, and Americans were either rich or poor. During this time period, there were many trying to level the playing field in their quest to improve their economic situation. 1. Jane Addams was famous for founding the Hull House in 1889. The house was dedicated to teaching immigrants and underprivileged individuals some sort of specific trade or skill along with English to allow them to fend for their personal economic freedom. 2. In 1886, the American Federation of Labor started Wage Protection; the American Federation of Labor came into existence under that name in 1886. In fact, it began with a longer, more cumbersome name, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada. This organization was founded on November 15-18, 1881 at the Turner Hall in downtown Pittsburgh. Many of the pioneers of the American labor movement in this period were German-American, though... Free Essays on Search For Order Free Essays on Search For Order Search for Order from 1877-1916 During the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s the United States had a great undertaking of finding order. Order, in the general term of life, both on the personal aspects and the country as a whole had been disassembled during the civil war and the events that occurred shortly there after. This paper is to illustrate how Americans executed the search for order, in the broad sense of the word. There will be three points brought to light to support the claim of order, the aspects of Economic, Social, and Cultural. ECONOMIC Economic stability and equal opportunity define the search for economic order for each and every American. During the time in question, there was very little economic order. Those Americans that were lucky enough to join the steel/cattle/ and other industries that were thriving in the early 19th Century were set for life, vs. the immigrants that just started to see American soil and work here for the first time. There was a huge contrast in wages, the wealth wasn’t spread very even, and Americans were either rich or poor. During this time period, there were many trying to level the playing field in their quest to improve their economic situation. 1. Jane Addams was famous for founding the Hull House in 1889. The house was dedicated to teaching immigrants and underprivileged individuals some sort of specific trade or skill along with English to allow them to fend for their personal economic freedom. 2. In 1886, the American Federation of Labor started Wage Protection; the American Federation of Labor came into existence under that name in 1886. In fact, it began with a longer, more cumbersome name, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada. This organization was founded on November 15-18, 1881 at the Turner Hall in downtown Pittsburgh. Many of the pioneers of the American labor movement in this period were German-American, though...

Cyclical Transportation Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Cyclical Transportation - Research Paper Example Example, when a shortage is foreseen, the carrier can get some additional capacity from other carriers to ship together when deficit comes. Demand forecasting is another important step a career should take. Demand forecasting shows whether there will be an excess or a shortage. After forecasting a weak customer demand that simply interprets to the capacity shortage, in the future so one can start preparing how to manage the shortage like in step number one above. Step number three is leveraging the available assets. That is possible by making sure all available assets are utilized. The capacity available should be loaded on the right asset hence making sure that space is well utilized. The carrier can also employ combining orders strategy where they consolidate orders from one place and ship with a transporting unit whose space will be well used. Creation of interpersonal relationships with the suppliers is another step. Customer goods from the suppliers have to pass through the carr iers for them to reach the customers. With developing the close relationship with the supplier, the suppliers get to share order information, delivery information and their day-to-day performance. Such information is necessary for the carrier is planning to offer low freight charges but provide the best quality. Learning from mistakes is another step carriers take in minimizing capacity shortages and their effects. They achieve this through the closed-loop process where they plan, access results and adjust the plan to saving costs.