Tale of Two Stories

A Tale of Two Stories

My objective in the following paper is to reflect on my previous experiences of instances of voicing and acting on my values in the workplace. I am going to do this by first writing about an instance in my career when management gave me an assignment that went against my values and I spoke up and did something about it. I will then reflect back to my decision by first discussing what I did and what the impact was, I will discuss what motivated me to speak up and how satisfied I am with the decision, and finally I will discuss a few things that may have made my decision easier, some of which I could have controlled and some of which I could not have.

The second part of this paper will be similar to the first. I will reflect on the outcome of a decision I made in the exact same ways above, only in part two, the experience I will be reflecting on will be a time in business where management asked me to do something against my values and I went ahead and followed through with the assignment. I will sum up this paper my discussing what I have learned from each of these experiences.

Let me start off by telling my story about the time a situation was put in front of me that went against my values and I did speak up. In my final summer before college graduation I took an internship with a national sports marketing firm. This company specialized in representing athletes for the purposes of memorabilia and appearances. This company put on a trade shows about two weekends out of every month across the country, and in between would travel the country to peruse athletes memorabilia rights or to just follow up with client visits. This job consisted of a lot of day work from 8-5, a lot of entertaining/nightlife, and very little sleep. The average day at a trade show involved waking up at dawn, setting up the exposition center to the liking of the particular athlete, picking up the athlete from the airport and taking them too the expo, and staying up until the middle of the night authenticating any of the product that was signed. This expo in my story, however, was twice as busy as it was in Boston right after the Red Sox won the World Series. Not only did they have a lot of fanatic fans but our company also represented a good number of their players providing for a lot of work on this trip outside of the expo.

Before I get to my value being tested, it is important to know that the company got the product form city to city by a 10-wheel truck (the biggest size a standard Texas license would allow a person to drive). It was the Sunday afternoon on the last day of the expo and the truck driver was hospitalized with a sudden case of appendicitis. The issue with this is we needed our product we acquired at the expo to be in Houston by 6PM Monday night to be ready to have out to the retailers first thing Tuesday morning. Being an intern, one of the Senior Managers of the