Ethics Marge Norman

Ethics Session 3 Assignment

1. What do you think of Q.T. Wiles? Is he exactly what this company needs?

• “Quick-tempered, autocratic, and intimidating” (pg. 3) who used to say he thought he could fix anything. To me he sounds like a hypocritical, egotistical maniac who was willing to allow blatant fabrications of data (primarily financial results) in order to show his skill at turning around MiniScribe.
• Q.T.’s Disciplines seem important and useful at face value, but further investigation shows how these ideals helped foster an environment of lies, where “accounting gimmickry became increasingly brazen” (pg. 7).

• Use Quarterly Dash Meetings as an example: reported by employees to essentially be inquisitions at which Wiles would frequently berate them in front of colleagues (pg. 5). Any wonder why these repeated actions would push people to falsify numbers?
• Another example: Weekly P&L reviews. These increase the pressure on the managers and fosters an environment of lies and cheating on a daily basis.

• Obviously Q.T. Wiles is not exactly what MiniScribe needs, since the company went bankrupt, but there were some qualities he maintained that would have been good for the firm:

• His management philosophy emphasized individual accountability (pg. 4). If this statement was actually enforced we might be reading a different case. Also, considering the end result of the firm, I would suggest that this particular statement is evidence of Wiles’ hypocritical nature.

1. What allowed such bad things to happen for so long?

• It sounds as if the high-pressure environment created by Wiles to constantly meet the numbers he wanted (pg. 7), regardless of the actual market conditions, fostered a desire and acceptance for deception. From there, it took a number of employees to collude and decide to actively falsify documents, break into auditors’ locked trunks (pg. 8) to change data, send obsolete parts and count them as revenue, ship bricks as products, etc.
• Given the high-pressure environment, the culture at MiniScribe eroded from a struggling start-up to a big company in which the bottom line was the only thing that mattered and in which the end justifies the means.

1. What is the responsibility of the General Manager of Singapore and his peers? What is the responsibility of the Board of Directors at Miniscribe?

• The General Manager of Singapore and his peers have a responsibility to their employees and their customers. Actively falsifying component data and labeling obsolete parts as active harms customers and employees because as customers receive bad components, they are less likely to purchase from MiniScribe, which further harms the company’s revenue, which eventually leads to layoffs.
• The Board of Directors is most responsible for ensuring that the CEO is performing his duties, which include acting in an ethical manner. Beyond enforcing this mandate, the BoD is responsible again to all of the firm’s employees, its shareholders, creditors, and customers.

1. Should Marge feel guilty? What else, if anything, should she have done?

• Yes and no. Obviously as management for MiniScribe, she is responsible to her employees and when the company went bankrupt, she failed them.
• Marge did report the scrap boxes incident to her boss, who indicated that he was aware and that it was a mistake. Generally people believe their bosses, and if the excuse provided was convincing enough, Marge would have no reason to not believe him.

• With that being said, the case mentioned that Marge “doubted that they [Longmont] would have made such a significant error” in regards to shipping the obsolete parts (pg. 9). If she doubted it that greatly, it couldn’t have been that difficult to call someone in the shipping department and ask why the mistake had occurred. That could have possibly set off a chain of events that may have led Marge to learning the true reason behind the incorrect shipment.

• Ultimately if Marge “had never been able to completely dismiss her concern about the incident” (pg. 9), then she should feel guilty; however, it is also not the responsibility of every employee to track down ever error they come across, especially if there are adequate explanations for why said mistakes occurred.