The Grad School Diaries: To the Lighthouse

Up at the top of the Leelanau Peninsula, at the northwestern corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, stands one of the loneliest structures I’ve ever seen: the Grand Traverse Lighthouse. Built in 1858 and not automated until 1972, the lighthouse was home to at least one and frequently two keepers and their families for over a century, and even today is located in what I can only describe as being the closest to the proverbial “middle of nowhere” I’ve ever seen that didn’t involve either a desert or a mountain range. Today the lighthouse is located in the Leelanau State Park, patrolled by rangers guarded by state police officers; you can get a surprisingly good pizza twenty minutes down the main highway, and you could be in the state capitol in four hours with a fast car. But if you stand on the rocky shore just to the northeast of the main building, you could easily imagine that nothing has changed, and the continent is half-wild and filled with unknown possibilities…

It’s windy and cold today; typical for early spring at these latitudes, but it’s always a bit windswept out here on the point. The narrow piece of land we’re standing on is surrounded by Lake Michigan on three sides, and the prevailing wind is as constant as it has been on most coastal regions I have visited; if the surf was higher and the spray was saltier you could easily believe that you were standing on the shores of an ocean, not a lake. Like most landsmen, I’ve always thought of lighthouses (when I thought of them at all) as the stereotypical tall round towers that keep watch over remote areas of coastline and warn ships away from the rocks, but the shores of the Great Lakes include some of the most treacherous waters in the world, and are consequently populated with a vast collection of lights and foghorns, some even more remote than this one…

We’re spending the day out on the Peninsula, visiting the town of Northport (which has a very good café) and several other communities offering local specialties in food, drink and artwork. It’s just a day trip – we’ve both got jobs to get back to, and I’ve got a lot of work to do if I’m going to be ready for the qualifying exams at the end of this summer. But as I’ve had occasion to remember recently, it’s important to keep your priorities straight – and while I am, beyond question, one of the seventeen current scholars who have the honor to have been selected for the doctoral program in Management at Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business, that by itself does not define me, and never will. I am also defined by the family that has adopted me, and whose name I have, in turn, chosen to carry; by the drive to know and understand this bizarre and sometimes insane world (and the equally bizarre and insane people who live here); by an iron will and a love for telling stories; and by the love for and of the most extraordinary woman I have ever known. It’s easy to lose sight of all of that when you spend your days reading overspecialized texts in an eight-by-twelve-foot office, but I am many things, and the first of all of them was the Seeker…

And I wonder, standing here on the shore and looking up at the tower rising out of the station behind me, if the men who used to keep watch over these waters ever felt the same way. It’s a tiny domain to be master of, and yet from this place they extended civilization over an expanse larger than most human kingdoms and forces that even modern man cannot really control. Walt Whitman wrote “The Sea is a form of mockery,” and I’ve often felt that he had a point, but today I can’t help but wonder if Walt meant that ironically. We are tiny things, humans, and our life is ephemeral enough to create whole schools of philosophy on that one point alone. And yet, what we do today might still be studied by legions of other graduate students, in other tiny offices, hundreds of years from now - just as the duties of those long-vanished lighthouse keepers might have saved lives, altered the course of history, and changed the world for the better...

I’d conclude by saying that it’s just another day in Michigan, expect I’m starting to wonder if there is any such thing as “just another day…”

The Ethics of Google

One of the units in the Strategic Management class I teach these days covers intelligence gathering, and specifically the need to use all of the people who work for you to gain and process information about customers, vendors, competitors, and environmental factors that might possibly impact the company. Information has always been the limiting factor on strategy development, and forward planning in general, and in the Internet age just about anyone who works for you could run across some critical piece of information on any given day – without even knowing what they’ve discovered. To illustrate the idea, I gave them the example of using Google to research your teachers before starting a class – and how, if they had Googled me they would have found this blog and all of the information it contains about my political, social, economic and personal biases. A good essayist could use that information to tweak a paper to hit my buttons, and even without that application, it would still help you to decide how much reliance to place on my lessons. But while everyone in the class seemed to be able to grasp the idea of gathering this sort of intelligence, a number of ethical issues came up in the same conversation, and I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look…

First, there’s the issue of whether using such information to get on someone’s good side is ethically correct. Granted that there’s not much point in sucking up to a graduate student instructor like me, but suppose it’s your boss – or the CEO who will determine if you’re going to have a long and lucrative career or go back to the farm. It’s hard to imagine how using publicly-available information to conform to his or her ideals of what an employee should be like would be illegal or immoral in absolute terms, but it’s still ingratiating behavior, and inherently dishonest, at least in potential. A more extreme example would be using someone’s online writings (blogs, fanfics, self-published poetry, or whatever) to profile them, and then using your profile of their psychology to manipulate them. It’s certainly possible, using modern search resources, but is it ethical?

Alternately, there’s the possibility of using these new resources to dig up dirt on someone. Examples like the teacher who used to be an “adult film star” are going to be relatively rare, but the old dodge of finding something that the CEO will hate about your rival (or even your boss!) and making sure that information gets loose around the company pre-dates the invention of the Internet by generations. This is also deep into an ethical grey area. On the one hand, you’d certainly want to know if your new company Controller did time for embezzlement, and it could be argued that you have a fiduciary responsibility to the company to make sure higher management knows about this, too. On the other hand, these same resources can be miss-used to tell your boss about a co-worker who attended a rival college, voted for the wrong party, or did something else to which your boss will take an unjustified but virulent dislike…

There was a time when gathering this sort of information would take months of pre-planning, days in the library, huge bribes, and occasionally the employment of private detectives; today the mad geniuses at Google can make all of this information available to you in a couple of keystrokes. The power that would once have been limited to a handful of rich and powerful individuals is now available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, and most people aren’t ready for that. The world has evolved, but our ethical structure hasn’t caught up with it yet. In many ways, the misuse of informational resources is just the flip side of the “cyberbullying” cases we’re starting to hear more and more about – and as we move further into the digital age, new social customs and corresponding laws are going to evolve. But until that happens, individuals with Internet access and search abilities will have a huge advantage over everyone who does not. So I have to ask you: is it ethical to use that power to gain a competitive advantage over your rivals in a business context?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: The Grand Traverse

Walking around the streets of Traverse City, it’s hard to believe that you aren’t in a resort town on the coast of an ocean, not a lake. Visually, the place looks a lot like La Jolla; the community feel reminds me a lot of Manhattan Beach, or Laguna Nigel, and the bite in the air would make anyone who’s ever been there think of San Francisco. If the climate here was tropical I would say the place was a ringer for Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii – one of the only other north-facing beaches I’ve ever seen, and another city that feels more like a commercial center than some prettified tourist trap. But we’re 2,400 miles plus from the Pacific and six time zones from Hawaii as of this morning…

It’s cold, rainy and windy this morning, especially for late spring, but this far north these conditions aren’t unusual for May, and no one seems especially put out by it. Downtown is only a few streets wide, but several miles long, as it follows the curve at the bottom of the Bay, more or less like every other beach town I’ve ever visited. We’re driving more than walking, because of the weather, but even that seems oddly familiar in some way. Part of it I can blame on Google, I suppose; we’ve toured these streets using Street View, and apart from the fact that the camera truck was here in the dry season (whenever that might be) the place looks just the way it did on the screen. But some of it is just the memory of other places and other times; I don’t actually know where the parking lots are, or where the streets start running one way only. The year is 2010, not 2001 or 1991, and I’m a long way from anything I’ve ever known…

During our first full day in the area we had breakfast at the Pie Company – the flagship store of the café where we have most of our breakfasts – spent some time exploring the town, and then headed up along the Leelanau Peninsula to visit some of the many wineries, cheese makers, candy makers, restaurants and artists’ colonies located in the small towns along both the Lake and Bayside coasts. It’s everything you’d expect from Michigan in the springtime – green and lush and wet, with arbors and groves of apple and cherry trees, vineyards, forests, rocky coasts, mirror-surfaced lakes, and winding country roads. It’s hard to imagine that this place is part of the same state as East Lansing, let alone Flint or Detroit; it’s wild and beautiful and remote, with huge stretches where the only obvious change since the pioneer days is the paved road…

Most of the vacations I took before 2001 (and after becoming an adult) were trips I went on by myself, since I spent most of the years between 1982 and 2001 alone. For the most part my immediate family is just as happy not to have to travel with me as I am to avoid them, and while several of my cousins are a lot of fun to travel with, differences in age, resource levels, interests and maturity levels generally prevent us from going on vacation together. I’ve made four different trips to Hawaii by myself, for example; I’ve also voyaged to Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, Colorado, Yosemite National Park, New York and Virginia with no companion, and recorded mixed results. Walking through the High Sierras alone has a John Muir vibe to it that’s actually kind of neat, whereas being on a beautiful, romantic tropical island by yourself is inherently depressing. You’d think that after almost nine years I’d be used to travelling with someone who actually enjoys going places with me, but somehow that never gets old…

Tonight we’re going to try one of the local microbrewery restaurants – I can’t drink anymore, but my wife still can, and the food at this place is supposed to be excellent too. Tomorrow we’ll visit one of the many local bakeries and probably do some shopping before we hit the road back to East Lansing. I suspect we’ll be back sometime soon; there are still a lot of things in the area that we’d like to do, and several other locations in this part of Michigan that would also be fun to visit. But even if we never pass this way again, I know I’ll always remember Traverse City beside the Bay on a rainy night…

Naming Rights

Anyone who has ever attended a sporting event at the Staples Center, or Comerica Park, or any one of a thousand other venues – or, for that matter, has attended a named school like the Eli Broad College of Business at MSU – already knows about naming rights. Most of the time it’s a harmless way to raise money for the school or make back some of the cost of building an expensive stadium and attracting a professional team to your city, although there have occasionally been incompetent uses of this concept – as in the case of the ballpark in Phoenix, for example, where Bank One was given the naming rights for $1 million a year. Arizona politics are a sewer, and the fact that a friend of several senior officials had been given a price for the naming rights that would have required 400 years to make back the cost of the building might have caused a bit of fuss if the governor hadn’t been indicted (and eventually imprisoned) in the same year…

If you were wondering how long it will take for somebody to sell the naming rights to an entire town, you can stop wondering. The town of Altoona, PA has gone through with the stunt that several Midwestern cities were threatening to do last year (when Google was supposedly looking for a new headquarters, and several places were supposedly offering to change the name of their whole town to “Google, Kansas” or whatever). You can find the original story from the Associated Press by way of MSNBC , but basically Altoona is going along with a publicity stunt being staged by Morgan Spurlock, the independent filmmaker best known for the documentary about living on junk food called “Supersize Me.” Spurlock’s new project lambasts the current state of advertising in America, and apparently he’s found a sponsor willing to underwrite re-naming the town for a week…

Of course, this isn’t a real case of buying the naming rights. Altoona will go back to its original name as soon as the promotional week is over and the headlines have been duly recorded and the fees paid. That doesn’t change the fact that for a certain period of time, over 30,000 people will be living in a town called “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." I can’t speak for anyone else, but it makes me wonder how long it will be before someone tries this on a larger scale. Detroit already is something of a huge 3D billboard for Chrysler, but imagine the possibilities of Denver as Presented by United Airlines, or Roto-Rooter Presents Cleveland. And if you could get the various studios bidding over who gets the rights to Los Angeles, you could probably balance the state budget in California, not merely the City or County finances…

I kid, of course, but there is a very real issue here with pushing back the boundaries of what is acceptable – and what is outrageous. I don’t know how the people of Altoona feel about their town and its traditional name, but I can tell you that very few people actually like the town I grew up in, let alone feel any attachment to its twice-recycled name – but there’d still be rioting in the streets if you tried a stunt like this there. Unless, of course, this sort of thing becomes commonplace, in which case we might very well be destined to witness a World Series or an NBA Championship series in which we see Microsoft versus Apple, or perhaps Nike versus Gatorade…

In which case, just remember: You heard it here first!

Where to Draw the Line?

Everyone knows that paying someone for professional services that include being around you and pretending to care about you (or simulating that experience) is perfectly acceptable. It’s not that your therapist, your hairdresser, your lawyer, your bartender or even your professional escort don’t care about you, exactly; it’s just that this is how they earn their living, and they probably wouldn’t be spending time with you if you weren’t paying them. By the same token, personal relationships aren’t supposed to involve the exchange of funds; you might pick up the tab if you go on a date, or buy drinks for a friend when you go out, but in general these people should be spending time with you because they enjoy doing so. But how do we classify a case where you have to pay someone to go on a first date with you, after which all future interactions are negotiable?

As weird as this might sound, a new website has just popped up that offers exactly this sort of opportunity. As reported on The ABC News Technology page , the site (called What’sYourPrice.com) allows people who claim to be attractive to auction off dates to people who claim to be “generous” for an agreed-upon price that does not include sex or anything else that would constitute an actual crime. You could think of it as being similar to any of the sites for consultants or freelancers, in the sense that you advertise your services and what you expect to receive for them, or alternately you can advertise what kind of services you need, and then wait for someone who suits your requirements to reply. This may be problematic on any number of dimensions – there have been all of the cases of professional escorts being stalked, attacked and even murdered by people who they met on Craig’s List, for example – but it does not appear to be illegal. There does seem to be some question about how far you can go into this grey area before you cross a line, however…

If someone has been stood up for a lot of dates, asking someone to put up money in advance would be an excellent way to avoid being blown off. If you’re fed up with people on dating sites who claim to be wealthy and/or good looking and aren’t, or people who claim to be single but are actually just capitalizing on their spouse’s business trip, or people who claim to be looking for fun, romance and a possible soul mate but turn out to just be prospecting for clients to sell insurance, securities, or real estate to, making them commit in this fashion might make them reconsider. The fact is, people do not place the same value on things they are offered for free, even when the things themselves are identical. When a community college I was working with offered business seminars for free anywhere from 40% to 85% of the people who signed up would just blow off the class; when we started charging $10 in advance we had fewer than 10% fail to show up. A date you have to pay for may not be the most romantic (or spontaneous) thing in the world, but it’s definitely going to produce fewer flakes – and if you want people to be more serious, you could always start quoting a higher price for less services…

On the other hand, the potential for abuse of this service is even more obvious than it is in conventional dating sites or services. One can easily imagine the people who are selling their time charging extra for a “happy ending” to the date, or a buyer offering to spring for three more dates at regular price if they receive a specified sex act at end of the current one. One can also imagine any number of scenarios in which various types of criminals use this service to screen their victims. In the long run, the whole concept may be legal, and may even become socially acceptable, but I’d hate to see anyone I care about participating on either end of this enterprise…

The Ethics of Team Spirit

Some time ago I asked you to consider the case of Comcast urging its employees to help it avoid being voted the “Worst Company in America” on the Consumerist site. At the time, I noted that it had been an ill-considered move on the company’s part, as it was inevitable both that word would leak out about the request and that the resulting firestorm of Internet mockery would make the company look bad if it didn’t already. But even if we feel that this specific action was foolish, it does raise the larger question of how much support a company can reasonably expect from its personnel when they are off the clock and going about their own business – which is not a trivial issue, nor is it a foolish question…

Let’s begin by establishing that no employer should ever assume that their employees are completely devoted to the firm’s cause; it’s a truism among line managers that the company does not own its employees – it only rents them. Thus, however much we might wish that our employees are spreading the good word about our organization when they’re away from work, this is not actually part of their duties to us, and we can’t expect them to do so. In the management literature, people who go beyond the scope of their job descriptions to help the company are said to be exhibiting “extra-role behaviors” or ERBs, which are generally described as including speaking well of or promoting the company while away from the workplace. While it would be nice to imagine that well-paid, well-treated employees would just naturally want to say nice things about our company, the truth is that we can’t expect such behavior, we can only ask for it. And this is going to cause problems if the employees feel that they aren’t well-paid or well-treated in fact – or in this case, that their employers really are one of the worse companies in America…

What makes this a question in ethics is twofold. First, asking your people to devote unpaid time and their own personal good name to support your company is bad for morale. The fact is, anyone who had strongly positive feelings about the company would probably vote in favor of it (and against the competition) whether you asked them to or not. Second, there’s a definite aspect of trying to influence a set of data with this action. The Worst Company in America poll isn’t a scientific study, and it’s highly debatable whether its outcome will actually influence any operational decisions in any of the affected companies, but to whatever extent this activity was really based on public opinion it will now be compromised by the organized cheerleading on the part of Comcast. If the company had actually demanded that its employees support it in this fashion that would be a third (and potentially much more serious) dimension, but there is nothing in the original story to suggest that they did. The real issue here is whether the company had the right to ask for this kind of support from its personnel in the first place…

Should the company be able to ask for support from its employees in a public forum? Or is it placing unreasonable pressure on its personnel by doing so? Does it matter if the company has made good-faith efforts to treat its people well and resolve the issues that got it nominated for this dubious “honor” in the first place? How about if the employees are participants in a stock purchase plan (in which case they are part of the ownership of the company, and WILL directly benefit by supporting it)? What if management limited their actions to telling the workers about the contest/survey and asking them to support the company’s position if they felt they reasonably could – in effect, asking them to vote their conscience? For that matter, does management have a responsibility to their stockholders (employees or otherwise) defuse the situation by drumming up support for their organization by whatever legal means they have available? That is, by taking no action, would management actually be failing in their fiduciary responsibility to the owners of the company?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: North of DeWitt

It might seem strange that after nearly two years in East Lansing we’ve never ventured any farther north of town than the outlying community of DeWitt (which has a diner we like) – unless you’ve also been a graduate student, that is. But life has been taking me in other directions since I’ve been here; specifically, it has taken me to Atlanta twice, Chicago twice, Detroit (or its metro airport, at least) three times, and New York and Los Angeles once each, plus side trips to Ann Arbor, Utica and Kalamazoo. There just hasn’t been any reason to head north, or any time to do so, until now…

My wife and I are off on a 3-day journey to Traverse City, in the north-west corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. It’s located at the base of the Grand Traverse Bay, a massive inlet of Lake Michigan that played an important role in the early maritime development of the state, and is reputed to be spectacularly beautiful. Ever a quick glance at the map will demonstrate that this isn’t quite as easy as it sounds, however. I grew up in a city with roughly the same population as this entire state, and most of the time you could get anywhere you’d want to go on an Interstate highway – or a bypass route branching off from one, at least. In Michigan there are only a few Interstates, and the majority of them are in the bottom of the state, connecting Detroit, Flint, Lansing and Grand Rapids with points west, south, and occasionally east. Except for the main northern route, Interstate 75 (which takes you over the Mackinaw Bridge and into the Upper Peninsula), going north means branching out into a maze of state highways, secondary highways, county highways, county routes, and two-lane roads less impressive than the street we live off of back in East Lansing…

Both of us enjoy this sort of travel, although we’d be pressed to tell you why. Perhaps I’m getting even for my childhood years of sitting in the back seat and going where other people wanted me to go. Perhaps my long-suffering spouse is getting back some of those years where she went only those places where she was expected to go – or even earlier times, when her family never went anywhere. Or perhaps we just like doing things together – which is a good condition for a middle-aged couple to have, if you think about it. For more years than I can count, I have been a mind forever voyaging, with the goal to see everything that can be seen, and understand all of it, good or bad. I’m a seeker, not a wanderer; I want a home to come back to between adventures, and fixed points by which to navigate, and a place in this world where I belong. I didn’t specifically go looking for someone who wanted to do these things with me, anymore than my wife did; some things just can’t be planned for. But if home is where the heart is, then we are surely each other’s home – and perhaps that accounts for why we can be anywhere at all, and never worry about where it is that we are going…

It’s a long drive from East Lansing to Traverse City, over rolling hills and rich farmland, through dark groves of old-growth forest, over rivers and past the occasional lake as we make our way north by northwest into one of the more remote parts of the state. I still don’t know where this mutual delusion is taking me, or where the next strange twist of fate will end up. But the explanation of why I don’t care so much where we land is becoming a lot clearer as we voyage into the lush, green interior of our adopted state…

The Commodore 64: Not Dead Yet

Thirty years ago next summer there were two great divisions among geek culture: Commodore and Apple. Much as was the case with Ford vs. Chevy a generation earlier (and among gearheads to this day), most geeks belonged to one camp or the other, and maintained that group identity in the face of all arguments of reason or logic. There were people who espoused loyalty to Tandy TRS-80 machines, Kaypros, Osbornes, Franklin ACE units, and even more obscure brands – just as there are gearheads who champion Nissans, Toyotas, Hondas, Studebakers, Packards, Hudsons, and many other forgotten car makes – but mainstream users were generally either Commodore or Apple. Back in 1981-1982, at the dawn of the personal computer age, IBM was still ignoring the PC market, as were Wang, Xerox, Cannon and Hewlett-Packard; the chairman of Digital had gone on record as saying that no one would ever want a computer for home-use, and Michael Dell was still in high school…

What most people do not realize is that while Apple has evolved to the point where the personal computer is no longer the focus of their business model (or the mainstay of their income, either) while the original Commodore corporation slowly went bankrupt in the early 1990s, the Commodore 64 computer itself never actually went away. To this day, there are dozens (possibly thousands; no one really knows) being used to run simple computer-controlled equipment left over from the 1980s, such as electronic message signs and even computerized manufacturing equipment. Their limited capability and miniscule memory may seem laughable by today’s standards (I’ve sent emails of more than 64K size in the last week alone) – but the new models coming off the line won’t…

According to the story that ran last week on the New York Times technology page , a new start-up company has purchased the old Commodore logos and console designs, and will be offering an upgraded version of the old all-in-on computer for the new Century. It’s the same size and shape as the old model 64 (the size of a large keyboard unit, which it actually is), but the new version features a 1.8 gigahertz dual-core processor, an optional Blu-ray player and built-in Ethernet and HDMI ports, as well as Windows capability (it comes with Linux). Functionally, the concept lands somewhere between a conventional desktop and a laptop machine; the new Commodore (like the original) needs to be plugged into a screen, but you can easily unplug it, tuck it under your arm, and walk off with it. The real question with the resurrected product is will anyone buy it?

It seems likely that there will be at least a few fans of the original machine who will buy it for the sake of nostalgia, and with the current vogue for “retro” design styling, the company should be able to manage a few sales on the basis of how much these things look like the best-seller from a generation earlier. That said, the original company was not able to compete in its niche market, either, and the new company will need more than just the handful of nostalgia sales if it wants to succeed. It may be possible for them to sell the convenience and portability of the all-enclosed design to the public, especially if they can find some way to make the purchase of large, high-definition screens separate from the CPU housing attractive to the buyer. If the new Commodore management can arrange some kind of strategic alliance with the people who make HD display units, they might do quite well indeed. Alternately, if they can find some way to bring greater functionality to their product at lower prices than you would pay for a typical desktop machine, they could probably compete on price and/or features…

So should we start looking forward to television commercials that begin with “Hi, I’m a Mac! And I’m a PC! And I’m a Commodore 64!” Or will the new company follow its predecessor onto the ash heap of history? Only time will tell…

Wal-Mart on the Spot

Over the years we’ve heard a lot of stories about Wal-Mart screwing up by the numbers in human resources situations – the low pay, the lack of benefits, the attempting to take away a settlement from an employee who had been permanently disabled in order to recover the company’s insurance costs, the crappy working conditions and hours, and so on. This has sometimes contributed to the company’s public image problem, and it has definitely led some people who work there to believe that they can sue the company for anything they want, since no jury is going to side with the evil retailer over the innocent employee they’ve been screwing over. According to a story that broke last week, however, this does not appear to be the case. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on your point of view…

You can see the original story on the Herald-News site published and maintained by the Sun-Times, but the gist of it is that a former Wal-Mart employee sued the company claiming that she was wrongfully terminated on the basis of her race and her religion. The company was insisting that the former employee was fired for cause, and that neither race nor religion had anything to do with it. In last week’s ruling the court found for the company – which seems much less surprising when you realize that the incidents over which the former employee was terminated involved “screaming over” a lesbian co-worker about how God does not accept gays, they “should not be on Earth,” and the co-worker was going to hell. To make matters worse, there were five witnesses to the incident, and the company was also able to prove that the fired employee had been made aware of company policy against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that such behavior was a termination offense…

The case doesn’t really lend itself to an ethics post, since there doesn’t appear to be any “other” side to this one. Religious discrimination and harassment of other employees can not be tolerated in any workplace, and Wal-Mart had followed state and Federal law to the letter, both in enacting the policy and in communicating to the employees. In fact, if the defendant in this case had been almost any other company it would be a total non-story; the facts appear to be that the company did nothing wrong and the plaintiff (the former employee) had no case. The only explanation I can imagine for why an attorney was willing to bring this action at all, let alone why the court was willing to hear it, is that the company’s abysmal record on human resources practices made it just barely plausible that there might actually be some basis for the lawsuit. Although if Wal-Mart remains as careful and thorough as they appear to have been in this case, that reputation may begin to recede…

We were all taught the fable about not judging a book by its cover back in elementary school; those of us who study human behavior are often reminded that even individual people are rarely one homogenous structure, and most large organizations can not be, by their very nature. It’s beyond question that Wal-Mart has some incompetent managers in its hierarchy, and some fundamentalist idiots in its rank-and-file, just like any other large company that has ever existed. To assume that any specific manager within the structure must be incompetent because some of them are is asinine, however, and so is assuming that any managerial action the company takes must be a violation of state and Federal labor laws. Of course, it’s also stupid to assume that workplace behavior that would be illegal for the company is perfectly acceptable for an employee, provided that he or she is deeply religious and a member of a traditionally oppressed minority…

But that’s a post for another day…

The Ethics of Investment Recovery

With the ongoing controversy surrounding health insurance, we’ve been hearing more and more about how costs within the industry are out of control and how the insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms are colluding to rob us all blind. Whether or not any of this is actually true depends very much on your point of view – and party affiliation – but it’s hard to deny that the companies involved don’t appear to be paying enough attention to public opinion when we read about cases like the 7,500% price markup instituted by K-V Pharmaceuticals last month. If you’re a Liberal – or even a progressive – it would be tempting to take such a case as a confirmation of everything you believe is wrong with our nation, the healthcare industry or our system of government in general; if you’re a hard-core free-market capitalist, you’re more apt to take this as the system working exactly the way it’s supposed to. But in either case, it’s still worth asking why these shenanigans go on, and what the companies behind them think they’re doing. So let’s take a closer look…

The first thing to keep in mind is that pharmaceutical patents have one of the shortest lives of any such protection, and the companies that earn them will generally spend at least half of that period just trying to get the FDA to permit them to market the product. A second point to consider is that most biomedical research is absurdly expensive, and even when successful will require vast numbers of computer, animal and human lab trials before you have any chance of actually selling any. Even worse, though, is that the majority of all such projects don’t produce a viable product; some industry sources claim that the failures outnumber the successes as much as ten to one. As a result, every successful drug has to make back the cost of its own development and that of several other (failed) drugs during the few years it can still be made and marketed exclusively by the inventor. Asking the stockholders who own the company not to recover those loses or not to try to make a profit is absurd; as we’ve discussed in this space, the stockholders are collective investors who have pooled their money in order to make a joint profit. If they don’t get to make a profit there would be no point in owning shares in the first place…

Unfortunately, non-profit ownership and state ownership (e.g. nationalizing the industry) have not proven effective in running enterprises of this type, and extending the period during which the patent is in effect doesn’t appear to be practical under the present system (e.g. too many people have an interest in being able to make generic versions as quickly as possible). Certainly neither approach has much chance of lowering drug prices. But more to the point, none of these prices were ever intended to be paid by the consumer directly; in nearly all cases those outrageous prices are supposed to be picked up by the insurance companies, who can get bulk pricing discounts on most drugs and can afford to pay the premium on the others. Where all of this breaks down is when we consider poor folks who can’t get medical insurance. There are assistance programs in place that can take up some of the slack, but here again, there are way too many people who fall through the cracks. All of which sets up some of the most difficult ethical questions I’ve ever encountered:

Do the drug companies have an ethical responsibility to bankrupt themselves and their stockholders in order to provide products at a net loss? Or does their fiduciary responsibility to their owners require them to try to recover their operating costs and turn a profit? For that matter, do insurance companies have an ethical responsibility to provide coverage for people on whom they can’t ever show a profit, or do their fiduciary responsibilities to their owners take precedence? Does our government have an ethical responsibility to provide health coverage to everyone who needs and can not afford it, and if so, does that responsibility supersede their responsibility to allow people to earn a living and make a profit (the workers and owners of the drug companies, respectively)? The political and ideological answers to this question are all perfectly clear; they depend mainly on your political and economic positions. The business ethics, however, are rather murkier. Is there actually an ethical choice that doesn’t involve the economic ruin of one or more groups of people?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: Meeting C-Bird

It was a dark and stormy morning, but we only live about eight minutes from campus, and unless there has been an actual blizzard we don’t really have any excuse for staying away. Accordingly, my wife and I had risen, dressed, and gathered up our belongings for another day of allegedly gainful employment. As we pulled into the strip mall up the road from our house we could already hear a faint song coming from the top of the structure.

“Is that him?” my wife asked, peering up at the dry cleaners’ sign.

“Yes,” I replied. “Look in the center of the ‘c’. It looks like he’s got his nest just about ready.”

I slid out of the Torrent and scooped up the bag of clothing from out of the back seat. This strip mall uses the sort of plastic sign where each letter is a three-dimensional construct, separate from all of the others. It’s eye-catching and surprisingly energy efficient, not to mention economical to maintain, since if you lose a letter you can just replace it, instead of having to buy a whole new sign. As I approached the shop, I could clearly see a large male house sparrow perched on the letter “C” in “Cleaners,” chirping away like mad. The cavity of the “C” was stuffed full of twigs, dried grass, and everything else a little bird could possible hope for in building a nest, and the sparrow was clearly calling for a mate, as he ignored the cars, the weather, the other male birds, and me. Still, I greeted him politely as I stepped up. “Hey, C-Bird,” I called as I walked into the store. “How ya doin’?”

I suppose I should explain that many years ago the woman who would later become my wife and her (then three-year-old) daughter were at a friend’s house to collect a kitten they had agreed to adopt (a large tortoiseshell they had decided to call Columbus), when they noticed the last kitten in the litter sitting by himself in the kitchen. On impulse, they decided to adopt the extra kitten, a Russian Blue with a stub tail, and my future wife asked what they should call him.

“R” said the little girl.

“You mean our?” her mother asked, puzzled.

“No, R, like that!” her daughter replied, pointing. Sure enough, directly above the kitten was one of those magnetic letters of the alphabet that children of that age play with, in the shape of a capital letter R. The kitten was sitting under the letter, as if naming himself.

My future wife considered. “How about R-Kitty?” she asked, thinking that this would at least give the poor creature a name (however eccentric), and not just a letter. Fortunately, her daughter agreed, and that’s how R-Kitty got his name. Fast forward 20 years, and we find ourselves in the parking lot of a strip mall in East Lansing, Michigan, where we encounter a large house sparrow who was building a nest in the middle of the letter “C” in “Cleaners.” We reasoned that if a kitten who sits under the letter R can be called R-Kitty, then a bird who nests in the letter “C” should be called C-Bird. And as our second winter in Michigan began to transition into spring he became our friend, a regular at the dry cleaner’s shop just like we were…

Sometimes I worry about the isolation that is part and parcel of a doctoral student’s life. I've made some friends at work, mostly among the doctoral students, but I've had very little contact with anyone else in the Lansing area. However I might feel about it (and making friends has never been one of my best things) I'm currently involved in a career activity that involves sitting at your desk up to 70 hours a week, trying to internalize research from years or decades ago. Someday soon, I know, I will leave this place and go out into a world filled with more human contact that you could shake a stick at – but for the moment, apart from a few members of the Business School and my immediate family, my closest friends for a hundred miles in any direction are a robin, a goldfinch, a Northern Cardinal – and a house sparrow who lives in the letter “C” of the electric sign at my neighborhood dry cleaners…

And yet, sometimes, it’s enough…

Virtual Partners

Growing up in geek culture, most of us knew somebody who always claimed to have a girlfriend “who goes to a different high school – you wouldn’t know her” or the equivalent. Some guys started early – I can recall one classmate who began this particular scam before we even got to middle school or knew about girls in the first place – while others would wait until all of their friends had girlfriends (or were trying to get one) and peer pressure got to them. Today, of course, this basic strategy has grown into the familiar “Canadian girlfriend” meme – which I imagine probably makes things difficult for Canadian ex-patriots who actually DO have a significant other waiting for them north of the border. But whether you’re doing it to look less pathetic or to pass for a straight guy, the activity has always been a mess of faked letters and emails, images of total strangers (some guys would just use the picture that came with the frame on their desk), and make-believe telephone calls – until now…

In hindsight, it seems fantastical that it has taken this long for such a service to evolve, but the Consumerist website is reporting the appearance of an online service that will pose as your girlfriend on Facebook – or presumably any other social networking site to which you belong. Called Cloud Girlfriend , the service claims that it will allow you to define your “perfect girlfriend,” whom they will then “bring to life” by posting various messages on the public areas of your Facebook page and such. You can then tell anyone who asks that this mysterious individual is your girlfriend, who lives in Canada (or Chile or China, or wherever you like) and that she can’t come to visit because of her school schedule, work demands, family obligations, or whatever fits best with her back story. Of course, this would appear to violate Facebook’s terms of service, and possibly several Federal laws (it depends on how you do it); it would also require quite a bit of effort to keep such an account current, since otherwise it would quickly become an obvious fake when other people couldn’t connect to it, exchange greetings, and so on. But by the same token, I don’t know how anyone would prove that such a “virtual girlfriend” didn’t actually exist…

Now, from the information available off the website (or, more accurately, the lack of it) there’s no way to tell for sure if this whole thing isn’t a hoax – or a scam. Certainly, I would advise caution to anyone who is thinking of sending money (or worse yet, giving a credit card number) to a site offering a service this hard to regulate or verify. For all you can tell from the site linked above, this could just be a more personal version of the venerable Penguin Warehouse scheme – a fake website that purported to sell live penguins as pets, but was never set up to take orders (and wouldn’t have been legal anyway). But even if the current “Cloud Girlfriend” site is bogus, this is one of those times when you can’t possibly get the genie back in the bottle. If no such service actually existed before this story broke this week, it’s probably safe to assume that it soon will…

Personally, I can’t see the harm in such an enterprise. I would never think less of someone because they can’t get a date (having fallen into that description for years at a time myself), nor would I start making uninformed “lifestyle” assumptions about them, but some people may feel more socially, personally or professionally confident if they have emails or wall posts from their extremely attractive and affectionate significant other who happens to be a virtual construct. It’s interesting to note that this is very clearly a Cloud Girlfriend service; it appears that everyone associated with it believes that only men would be desperate, needy, pathetic or conniving enough (pick the adjective that best fits your opinion of men) to want a virtual girlfriend in the first place. It’s also worth noting that all of the major Internet dating sites have been accused of creating “ghost” members – women (and very occasionally men) who don’t really exist – and fabricating messages from these virtual clients to real hopefuls using their service…

Which means that there is a non-zero chance that at least some of the people who sign up for “Cloud Girlfriend” service already have a significant other on the Internet who doesn’t actually exist…

Pro Bono Publico

Over the years I’ve been asked a lot of tax questions, considering that I’m not an attorney or an enrolled agent (tax preparer). For reasons that probably pass understanding, a lot of otherwise sensible people seem to believe that anyone who went to business school must know about these things, and that anyone working as a management consultant can also provide them with free information about finance, accounting, tax law, municipal law, recycling, charitable donations, green business, depletion of the ozone layer, the detailed management of every type of business that could possibly exist (whether or not it actually does), U.S. history, world history, engineering, high-energy physics, cooking, entertainment, script writing, movie production, education, squirrel migration patterns, the relative probabilities of everything from the success of their new business venture to how well their favorite team will do in the Super Bowl (or NBA Finals or World Series or Stanley Cup or World Cup) and whether their spouse is committing adultery and with whom they are doing so…

That said, probably the most common fallacy you encounter in the consulting business is that people who are self-employed (and free-lance consultants in particular) can write off time they donate to charity, since they are in effect donating their stock in trade. I try to avoid answering any of the questions referenced above (unless I actually know something about the question, and sometimes even then), but most of the time people don’t really ask me this; they just assume that I will be willing to donate MY time to their cause – since I can just write it off on my taxes and enjoy the deduction. Alas, this is not true. You can take a look at the annual Fox News story about things not to try deducting if you don’t believe me (it’s about two-thirds of the way down), but the simple fact is that I’m limited to deducting my mileage and any out-of-pocket expenses I can prove I made on the charity’s behalf, just like anyone else…

Unfortunately, most people who run non-profits (and especially small and/or recently-formed ones) generally know a lot more about the cause they’re incorporated to work on than they do about tax law, and I will almost invariably be accused of holding out on them. I always wonder if these are the same people who keep being prosecuted for trying to claim their home telephone land-line as a business expense (you can’t), deduct their clothing and dry cleaning bills as business expense because they wear those clothes to work (not allowed; IRS assumes that you would have to wear something regardless) or attempt to claim their pet as a dependent (a classic; not possible unless you’re a Warner Brothers cartoon character). Even the people who grasp the idea that trying to get me to help you because I have professional knowledge that could help you and then failing to listen to me when I tell you something is patently illegal is stupid will sometimes try to get me to try this anyway, in the hope that the IRS will miss it…

Now, before you accuse me of going all emo on you, keep in mind that most other professionals have the same problem. Some people (notably lawyers) do gain professional benefits from doing pro bono work; some are even required by their state bar association (or other professional organizations) to do so. But even if it was possible for me to get a break on my taxes by doing charity work, there would still be the matter of how do I make a living in the first place? If you’re asking me to moonlight for a charity I suppose I could use the tax break to offset withholding on my day job, assuming I could get such a break in the first place, but otherwise this is nothing more than an elaborate way of asking me to do something out of the goodness of my heart…

The Ethics of Free Speech – Social Network Edition

A few weeks ago we talked about the First Amendment implications of Facebook posts – specifically, posts made by middle school students accusing their teachers of various despicable crimes for the fun of it. Now, for those of you who have forgotten, children of that age have always delighted in heaping abuse upon any teacher who isn’t a complete favorite of theirs, and using criminal terms as pejoratives simply because it’s another form of abuse. The idea that this might be wrong, let alone actionable in a legal sense, is an alien concept even to these children of an interconnected age. My point in calling it to your attention is that it won’t always be that way; that as the case law regarding these types of writings is developed, the law will probably come to view writing anything about another person in a social networking forum as being no different from publishing such things in a newspaper or saying them on the 11:00 news. The very nature of private communications – and public behavior – is about to change, and there’s nothing we can do about it…

As managers, however, it is our job to find a way to run a business operation without either infringing upon the rights of our employees or allowing our customers, vendors or supervisory personnel to be publically slandered. This raises a number of additional issues, and I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some of them. For example, does a business have any right to regulate what its employees write on their own Facebook pages, web sites or blogs while off-duty and not working or speaking for the company? The First Amendment just says that Congress can’t pass laws limiting freedom of speech or freedom of expression; a private employer can impose any rules of conduct they like, so long as those rules are applied to all of their employees in a non-discriminatory manner. But while a company regulation that states you will be fired if you speak badly of the company or a specific client in public might be legal (especially in states like California, where you can pretty much contract with anybody to do anything you like), I have to ask if they would be ethical?

Then there’s the question of how is the company supposed to monitor or verify what their employees do online. Any postings made under the employee’s own name would be relatively simple to find, but what is the company supposed to do about accounts opened and maintained under a pseudonym? Just trying to monitor the places where somebody could have posted negative comments of some kind would require endless amounts of labor, draining company resources away from more critical uses. One could quite legitimately argue that as the duly appointed representatives of the stockholders, it is our duty to make sure that company resources are not wasted on marginal activities like attempting to monitor every moment of the online lives of our employees. But if don’t monitor those online activities, how can we hope to enforce such policies, assuming we have them in the first place?

In the long run, it’s going to come down to the question of what we can reasonably expect of reasonable adults in this brave new Internet age. Can the company expect its employees to understand that everything they say (or do) in public can have consequences and will cost them their jobs (or their careers) if the wrong person sees those posts or actions and takes offense? Or should we just have every employee sign off on agreements that absolve us of responsibility for anything they do or say online, and then throw them off the back of the sled if there are ever any complaints? Should we lobby for new laws that support such an arrangement – knowing that our own personal ability to sue will also be curtailed by such laws – or just let things shake out however the case law takes them?

It’s worth thinking about…