Ethics And Strategy - Essay Example

Week I Individual Assignment and Week VI Company Selection Connie Johnson June 16, of Phoenix Week 6 In order to choose the companythat I want to research further for the week 6 project I followed the professor’s advice and choose a company from the Russell 2000 index. I was not very familiarized with the index so I had to search online for a list of the entire composition of the 2000 companies that made up Russell 2000. The company I choose from the index was Barnes & Noble. Barnes and Nobles is considered the world’s largest book retailer.

The company currently has 1341 retail and college bookstores across the nation as well as an online bookstore. I choose this company because I believe in the value and importance of the service this company is providing to the community. The foundation of education is based on written literature. This course is about strategy and despite not knowing the purpose of the week six paper I am assuming it has to do with strategy. I have seen what has occurred to other companies in the publishing industry.

Big chain bookselling stores such as Borders ran out of business. Barnes and Nobles is in need of a new strategy formation to ensure the long term success of the company. Week1 During the past year and a half my perspective about ethics and social responsibility has changed a lot due to my experience with the MBA program at the University of Phoenix. In the past I was not as aware about the existence of many problems worldwide particularly the real poverty situation across the world. Databases such as CultureGrams and CountryWatch have taught me that there are parts of this world that are suffering from poverty beyond belief.

In places such as Africa, China, and Afghanistan the majority of the people have to survive on less than $2 a day. I have learned that some of the ethical decisions of world governments are also beyond belief. For example the US started a war with a country, Afghanistan, whose people are living in a place where their economy generates only $900 of gross domestic product per capita (CountryGrams, 2011). The yearly gross domestic product per capita in the United States is 51 times higher. Instead of being at war the US should looking for ways to feed those Afghani families dying of starvation.

I learned from my experiences at the UOP so far that the majority of the world’s wealth is in the hands of private corporations. This is the primary reason why corporate social responsibility is so important. The only way our world is going to change for the better is if the corporate world begins to contribute more towards social causes. I also learned that ethics plays a key role in defining the corporate culture of a firm. Due to a lack of ethics the US at the beginning of the 21st century experienced the two biggest bankruptcies in its history in the cases of Enron and WorldCom.

The Enron case was particularly hard to swallow since the executives of that company due to greed and a lack of ethics ruined the lives of thousands of investors and employees who lost their investments and pension funds. As I have learned more about business throughout the program my perspective about the importance of ethics has changed. Before I thought ethics was just a word and its application dealt more with religious things. I was so wrong in that simplistic point of view. Ethics is an integral part of any business and without it a business can enter into chaos very quickly.

In order for the four major components of the strategic management process to have validity and credibility the manager must apply ethics throughout the process. When a manager is developing a strategic plan ethics must be present throughout the process. For instance a manager must prepare financial forecasts based on credible techniques that are used in the industry. Using regression analysis, time series, or the Delphi method would the proper and ethical way to create a forecast. An unethical manager may make up the numbers out of the top of their head without using a credible technique.

This can lead to major problems in the future if the venture fails to achieve the results that the manager stipulated in the strategic plan. There are many ethical considerations that must be considered in the strategic process especially if the strategic plan deals with a company that is doing business internationally. Actions such as paying bribes should not be considered by a legitimate business. Also companies should not take advantage of relax environmental or laws to exploit the native population of another country.

Back in the late 1990’s the giant apparel company Nike got involved in an embarrassing sweetshop scandal because they acted unethically based on the lack of governmental regulation in regards to labor laws in the places where they established their sweetshops. Abusing the environment is also unacceptable. A strategic approach based on moving an operation away from the Unites States to a developing country based solely on being able to pollute the environment is a flawed unethical strategy. Such actions are doing nothing, but hurting everyone on our planet.

Nowadays thanks to advances in communication technology companies can no longer get away with unethical acts as they could in the past. The information superhighway has helped the world create awareness about the actions of corporate villains. Managers must learn that ethics and strategy are correlated concepts. References CultureGrams (2011). Afghanistan. Retrieved June 16, 2011 from CultureGrams database.