Reflection Paper on Business Ethics

Meetings, are the keys to success for a profitable corporation. But you always hear about examples of overspending on corporate meetings for high ranking officials within the corporation. The “Cloudy Profit” article gives a prime example of this. You have the founding partners who have turned annual meetings into a vacation.  Kevin Davidson, Mentor of myself, baseball coach and ex-professional baseball player, and financial advisor of big figures in todays society once said about a baseball game, “Baseball is fun, but if you are looking to have a career in baseball treat it like business. The season is not a vacation but your job that you must develop your skills.” In the article Bart (Manager of partners), and Shelly (Sales & Marketing manager) argue over the fact of partner distribution and overspending of the annual meeting. The company operates the meeting efficiently during the rough times, like the 2008 collapse, where they minimized spending on the annual meeting, but when times were better the following year Bart decided to overspend on the meeting. Was this ethical?

If I was in this situation working for Alliance Partners I would be concerned with the amount of money is being spent on partner meetings, like Shelly (Sales & Marketing Manager). I believe Shelly has done the right thing as a partner expressing her disgust for the amount of money being spent on their corporate meetings. As a partner, and figures of the highest management, it is your job to maximize profits while growing the company. Spending mass amount of funds on unnecessary meeting locations is not the ethical decision management should be making.

        Bart, Managing Partner, made great decisions for the company like: transitioning the company’s data to the cloud. This reduced the company’s operational cost by 62%. It Allowed Alliance in the following year to speed up and provide a higher quality data for individual real-estate profiles. This decision though unfortunately reduced the in-house hardware staff by 65 percent. This decision was made after the real estate crash that cost the company a lot of money. This move has dug Alliance out of the financial hole the collapse caused. Gross margin for the following year was 74 percent, but just because of this good year following the bad year Bart wants to increase partner distribution by $1 million, $3 million, or $5 million.

        I don’t believe Bart understands what that may do to a company. Having to raise dividends basically will cause an increase in investors, but how long can the company keep up with high dividends before they encounter another financial problem? But do believe he made the right decision in preparing the company for long-term success.

        If the company looked at this decision from a teleological standpoint, it was an unethical decision to cut operational cost, causing a lot of cuts in jobs. But as higher management sometimes you have to make decisions like that, which are most beneficial to the long-term success of the company. Which as if I was put in that situation would make the same decision.