Brainstorming Alternatives for Our Client

This thread isn't to be used as your "blog entry for the day." This is a safe place where you don't have to count leadership or ethics terms, or satisfy any of our 54 tasks. This is simply an arena for us to brainstorm and build off of each other's ideas for how to satisfy our client's needs.

That is, how do we indoctrinate the current JCU code of ethics/mission/values into the students & faculty at the Boler School? How do we make those values LIVE and be more ACTIVE in everyday interactions? How do we hammer these morals home to all those who pass through the Boler School's doors?

Ok I'll start. I attended JCU from 200-2004 and went through the Boler School. We were required to take Business Communications and write a huge term paper at the end of the course, we all had to take a Speech class and give three speeches to our classmates throughout the semester to refine our public speaking skills. We also had case-based group projects & term papers in most of our major courses at the Boler School.

But I do not remember ethics being overtly present in any of those classes. I am not saying they were completely absent, but nonetheless here I stand and I don't remember it being taught/threaded into the individual courses. One of our recommendations should be that the Boler School deliberately thread ethical decision making into all business classes. This wouldn't require a complete-redesign of all of the classes, but merely "tweaking" the current course structure to include ethics & ethical decision-making in many of our required concepts.

For example, making the inclusion of "ethical considerations" or "ethical dilemmas" a mandatory part of case-based projects or term papers. Much like we used the daily blogs & movie clips to "get our reps in" and indoctrinate ourselves into the wonderful world of leadership & ethics in MB 551/552, the Boler School should use their existing coursework as an opportunity to integrate deliberate ethical consideration into students' thought processes.

Questions/Comments/Concerns??

I think we made great progress in finally boiling down the project to something with "teeth". I did have a question that I was not able to ask due to the time constraints. Why does the Boler school and JCU currently think that what they do to instill ethics into their students is not working? Has there been a lot of people caught cheating or breaking rules in their current codes of ethics? I think this is important to consider when we are brainstorming recommendations about how engage students and instill the code of ethics into their decision making. Maybe ask what they feel have been the shortcomings of past attempts to create this ethical culture they are seeking? Any thoughts? .

That's a great question. We still have clients left to interview, that question should probably be on the list.

Here are some of my ideas and notions I heard in class yesterday.

- Case based integration:
Weekly highlighted case analysis, would be emailed to through the weekly JCU email update or by a Boler specific newsletter email.
- Student written, faculty approved, make it a requirement for all Boler students or contest depending on how many should be highlighted per week (average 25 in an MBA cohort makes up half the year already)
- Course based: use specific courses to dictate subject matter ie. Stats or Analytical Modeling could look at the ethics of how data can be skewed or massaged to get a desired outcome.

- Hindsight:
From the Clinton debate: Why is it that ethics is an issue at the forefront only after a violation? This seems true in business, politics and academia. How can we make ethics proactive instead of reactive.

- Positive vs. Negative:
- Some of the client have commented that previous cohorts have weighed in heavily on the consequences of bad leadership/ethics, but not the benefits of being ethical/making good ethical decisions.
- Let's highlight the beneficial side of good leadership and good ethical behaviors/decision.

- One-act plays with the students acting in them to illustrate ethical decisions and the outcomes. This can be designed to show the "grey" of decisions, or to show the benefits of good ethical decisions.

- Using the 15-20 page document task: Keeping in mind that the university and Boler already have a code and mission statement.
- Use this as a research tool for methods of endoctrination/culture change that have worked in the past.
- Use this a document of presentation that highlights the methods we would like to suggest to the client.

- The indication from the client is that a single required ethics class has been attempted and fails to overcome the growing apathy from students as they progress through the program. Something more substantial, persistant and sustainable is required.

- It is clear that we need a mission statement.

- Scott A's suggestion is that we need to accurately identify the premise/code/concepts of ethics the client wants to weave into the Boler culture, adn that this should be approved with the Dean of Boler. This should not take long as Boler has a mission statement, ethics code, enforcement policy, etc.
- After the culture of ethics is defined, we need to present our ideas to the Dean, essentially what we want to present to the entire client. (He recognizes that she will essentially see the presentation ahead of time, but her approval is essential to the project legitimacy and the rest of the client will see this all as new when presented. This will allow her to clear some of the chaff from the wheat of the brainstorming session/research.

Justin just posed a HUGE question concerning asking the client WHY they feel they need a better method of getting students to embrace the current code of ethics? Has there been an increase in cheating/other ethical failures in the Boler school? I believe highlighting evidence of the code failing will save us a tremendous amount of time by quickly pointing our brainstorming in a more specific direction based on their response...

-LP

This is my take on what I heard last night additionally I think from what Tabitha was saying after class is that there is a serious issue regarding the lack of professionalism among students and faculty holding students accountable so what ever it is that we do finally present needs to be a top down approach.

Establish and instill a SIMPLE set of CORE VALUES with simple definitions not drawn out. For example:
• Educational Excellence
• Integrity
• Professionalism
• Community
Positively reinforce these Core Values through:
1.) The development a concept I call “Business Partners” or whatever you wish to call it. Similar to a concept that I am familiar with which is the Air Force Wingman Concept:
• Constantly, holding one another accountable and looking out for each other
o Faculty and students promoting good behavior together
o Correcting poor behavior when witnessed at the lowest level
 I know this is contrary to what they said but it instills citizenship vs. punishment by a higher authority
2.) Allocating class time to promote ethical behavior
• e.g. dedicate 15-20 minutes a week to case studies that tie together ethics, current events and relevant course material
• For undergraduates have in-class or emailed safety/ethics briefings prior to weekends
o i.e. don’t drink and drive, look out for one another, just consistent awareness of dangers/situations that young people face throughout the course of a any given weekend

Basically continuous reinforcement of the core values which needs to begin at the top. It cannot just be a set of rules to follow when you are in the business program or on campus for that matter. It should be promoted as a set of core values to live by…

I like the imagination out here thus far. Maybe I am being overly optimistic, but I feel we are a lot closer to having this defined and pointed toward what our client wants to achieve. Thinking back to last night, I especially agree with the comments posed by Jon, in which there was some open thoughts by Paul Murphy wondering how a tragic accident like that takes place when the institution spent 4 years molding somone to act otherwise. That links up well with the question posed here by Justin.....in other words, why is it that the BSOB does not have any "followers responsiblity" among the students?

To quote Ron, "Something more substantial, persistant and sustainable is required", and I would like if we can build that in. I can relate to that, as I have my CPA credential and ethics is taken very seriously, especially when I used to work in public accounting. It was a requirement of my employer that everyone had to have X many hours of training in ethics and related topics annually. Because it was something that you were reminded of several times throughout the year, behaving ethically became more of a 2nd nature and habit, so I like going down that avenue. Also taking into account Tabitha's comments regarding the lack of professionalism, why does the faculty currently not model the way for the students? That is sort of like the old saying of "Do as I say, not as I do" (by the way, on a sidenote, that is an actual book.....while I have not read it, if someone in our class has, it may serve as some more talking points for our 15 page literary review).

My approach to our updated Boler School mission statement was to combine the words/ initiatives of Jesuit, JCU, Boler School, and Dean Sheely into a concise (I understand it will take a few reads) mission statement. I used the 5 W's technique from Jarus' class and below are the words I picked out and categories I segmented each into. Each of these words appeared more than once across the mission statements mentioned above.

Who: Tomorrow’s leaders
What: Culture, Jesuit tradition, Global perspective
Where: Into the business world, Not only in the organization which they work but in their community, Dynamic business-educational environment
When:
Why: To make ethical business decisions that not only increase the bottom line but also bring about change in the world, Socially responsible
How: Innovative techniques; Develop & Inspire Honesty; Educational excellence & Confront challenges; Intellectual, personal, and moral development

I took these terms to try to create my own Boler School mission statement:

The Boler School strives for educational excellence and to develop tomorrow’s business leaders into socially responsible individuals who choose to make ethical business decisions that not only increase the bottom line, but also bring about change in the world by instilling values, driven by the Jesuit traditions and a global perspective, and by using innovative techniques to motivate intellectual, personal, and moral development.

My thinking is that we can use this updated mission statement (once finalized by the dean) to begin to base our recommendations on the concepts mentioned. We can do this by extracting specific words/ phrases from the mission statement to base our recommendations, which will be supported by the 54 tasks we have accomplished.

The framework for the Boler culture has already been established... our objective is how we can continuously improve what has already been developed and make it resonated even more with current & future JCU students.
My recommendations include:
1) Candidate profiles - very similar to a hiring process at a large organization, that requires candidates to take a series of personality and competency test prior to being hired, make future Boler students take a test to see if they "fit in" and possess the qualities the school is looking for. Of course, the candidate profile(s) would need to be defined.
2) Work with the professors to embrace more of a positive culture, rallying around the successes of students. Further develop the leadership capacities of the educators interacting with students on a daily basis, get them to buy-in to a new culture, ultimately they will sustain it.
3) Refresh the Boler logo / make the current mission statement more visible & give it a modern look.
4) Create a cross-functional committee, between students & professors, that review ethics & culture

That is all for now, as more ideas come, so will more post.

After reading a lot of the other posts, I find myself having similar priorities in terms of the mission/vision/moving forward.

I completely agree with asking the client why they feel that the university has failed in regards to ethics. Clearly there had to be some shortcomings if they felt strongly enough to form a committee and work towards a new method. Secondly, ethics has to be interwoven into each class in the Boler school. This will be hard to implement in some of the other schools, as how ethics is related to Calculus, English Lit, etc, is beyond me. Business has come under so much scrutiny in recent times, that we need to make sure that we are graduating strong ethical decision makers. Whether this is a case-based method, or perhaps class simulations, that is up for debate.

I am working on the ethical analysis of the Jesuit institutions, (per Scott A's ruling for the only Jesuit universities), and obviously they all have the same "pillars of Jesuit education," but the implementation piece is not there. So for this, I think it would be best to ask each person in the class. Did any of your universities do a particularly fantastic job at creating a culture around ethics in your respective schools? Based on what we hear from the dean on the mission statement, we can move forward with the "what are we recommending" piece of it so that we can each tie our tasks to it.

Similar to Neil's Wingman idea, but what if we were to have the Boler school's juniors and seniors mentor the fresmen and sophomores? Starting thie junior year of school, each student is assigned a underclassman student or maybe something like 2-4 students to work with and take under their wing. This might be a good way to integrate leadership and management techniques for the leaders approaching graduation. If JCU really wants to grow tomorrow's leaders, the reps need to sttart today so that students are confident leading others and making deceisions that have effects on other people. Faculty buy-in would come in the form of assinging projects or cases or other assignments that revolve around these mini-cohorts. If each student in the Boler school is constantly leader others and answering, to some degree, to those same group of others we kill 2 bird with 1 stone in engraining the ethical culture and giving real leadership experience before internships or the first job out of college.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Be safe.

Erik

In case it hasn't been posted already, I'll post the JCU mission statement below so that people don't have to search on the school website.

As a Jesuit Catholic university, John Carroll inspires individuals to excel in learning, leadership, and service in the region and in the world.

And here's the vision: John Carroll University will graduate individuals of intellect and character who lead and serve by engaging the world around them and around the globe.

With these things in mind, I really like Mark's ideas of integrating ethics into each class. Students must learn ethically, lead ethically, and serve ethically to complete the JCU mission. Likewise, students must have a solid ethical character to achieve the vision of leadership and service. By integrating ethics into each class, good ethics can become part of a student's everyday life. Ethics will be "second nature."

I also agree that we must identify what students' current ethical failures are to more accurately identify what our problems, goals, and deliverables should be. That could really help us limit the scope of our project.

I know the question of "What are they looking for?" keeps coming up.

I don't believe this it is about cheating, or other strictly academic related issues and I believe we are running into a conceptual block here.

It's more about professionalism, integrity, and overall character.

I had a conversation after class on Tuesday that mentioned such items of interest as follows:

Professionalism - not looking like a duffle bag (sorry for the military terms) when you show up for a career fair or guest speaker, not having your feet up on a table when a guest speaker comes to the University and if it does happen make sure that type of behavior is corrected immediately by whoever sees it first!

Also, that the Dean had said something as simple as picking up trash when you see it on the ground...

From the conversation I feel it's a lot about getting the big picture, they (I'm assuming undergrads) can be great when it comes to schoolwork but they are not projecting the attributes of good leadership.

Furthermore, I feel that what Jon said with his intel from Dr. Murphy emphasizes that we need to reinforce the idea of having the courage to do what's right at all times.

Bottom line, and Dr. Allen said it himself, we need simplicity.

Honestly I think we need an advertising company, we need to find a slogan, a super bowl commercial, or whatever but it needs to RELATE to undergrads, it needs to happen quickly, and from what we are hearing it needs to encapsulate what is already in place....

I like Neil's idea of a slogan. They work, that's why they are all over the place. Much of what we have been hearing and learning (as well as seeing in our lives) is that continuing practice is necessary for continuing improvement. How do we get the mission, core values, whatever, in front of students everyday so that they think about it? Maybe something as simple as a slogan or motto for the Boler School would do, something that is short, recognizable, easy to remember and reminds students of the culture and mission of the university. Then we have it posted everywhere, posters, plaques on official documents, e-mail signatures at every door into the business school, in front of every classroom. Similar to a motto used by sports teams to bring them together for a common purpose.
Be better, everyday
Value excellence
Truth, value, justice, solidarity
Courage to lead