SIFE: Building ethical standards needs to start early on

In December of 1999, the College of the Ozarks' Students in Free Enterprise team presented its first Ethics Symposium.

The event featured a panel of seven professionals from across the United States including: Larry Walther, vice president of industrial relations for Southwestern Bell; James Roos, president and chief operating officer of Candlewood Hotel Suites; Dennis Graves, reporter for NBC affiliate KY3; John Vail, account representative for Milburn Ritchfield Corporation; state Sen. Doyle Childers; John Hale, vice president of human resources for Leggett & Platt; and Albert Angulos, U.S. Trade and Development Agency regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The topic of discussion for the event was the ethical implications of international business with foreign firms from countries that have different human rights policies than those of the United States. Discussion questions were presented to the panel members and they were able to offer their own perspectives.

Several of the panel members gave personal examples of incidents within their organizations and gave advice on how to manage such incidents in an ethical manner. The purpose of the program was to educate students about current ethical issues and prepare us to manage them should they arise in our own careers.

Students sometimes become so engrossed in textbooks and the theories that they offer, that it becomes difficult for us to envision ethical situations that can arise and there is no basis of support to help us in our search for resolutions. This is where the Ethics Symposium comes into play. Programs such as the Ethics Symposium are beneficial in that they help in the conversion from the textbook world of college to the real world.

Students in Free Enterprise modeled this program after a series that PBS produced in the late 1980s entitled "Ethics in America." Several well-known individuals including Rudolph Guiliani, T. Boone Pickens Jr. and Warren Buffett hosted the program. The hosts were assembled to role-play and discuss ethical situations ranging from the ethics of a corporate takeover to ethics within the military. Fred Friendly, a spokesman for the series, emphasized the importance of ethics best when commenting on the corporate takeover segment.

"With companies acquiring and merging with one another at an astounding rate, and the mind-boggling amounts of money involved, the ethics of such situations must be analyzed. With the sizes of these mergers and acquisitions, everyone becomes involved, from Wall Street to Main Street. Everybody is affected," Friendly said.

Today, students must have a standard of ethics before entering the workplace and not be forced to develop one haphazardly. If students have already developed a set of ethical standards before entering the workplace, then those standards have had time to mature and become a source of guidance.

(Tod Jackson is a senior business administration major at College of the Ozarks, and a member of the Students in Free Enterprise chapter.)