Mitten Shaped Flights

  According to Ben According to Ben, I’m on the right path! As many know, Benjamin Franklin was an important history figure dating back to the formation of the United States. Franklin played a key role in everything from inventions, to authoring public policy which culminated in the creation of the Declaration of Independence. But Franklin also established himself as a critical thinker and devised something called his 13 virtues. Ben’s Virtues ( Juma, 2021). 1. Temperance Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. 2. Silence Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. Order Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. Resolution Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. Frugality Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e. waste nothing. 6. Industry Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecess...

  Balancing ethics with winning No one is telling companies they must balance being ethical and winning in business. The only real issue is social norms suggest companies provide a valuable, and honest product, otherwise they run the risk of a public relations nightmare. Being ethical is also a great safe, and realistic way to run a business, but it certainly is not a requirement.  The functional area most closely related to ethical abuse in firms is marketing (Dincer & Dincer, 2014, p. 151). Companies have found that marketing can stretch the truth in very unethical ways, practically to the point they are outright lies. Unbalanced Subway shoes Take for example the marketing issue that surfaced with Subway a few years ago. Subway was using ingredients in their bread that were found in the production of running shoes and was known to cause cancer. Yet, Subway’s response was to run a series of advertisements that called attention to their use of “real bread” in their s...

  Affirmative action works If racism were a relic of the past, then some arguments for affirmative action would be out of place (LaFollette, 2007, p. 96). Isn’t this the truth? Our current society has long shown that racism is quite the founding member in our environment. Each, and every day we’re reminded by acts of hate towards other groups of people. Not only is this standard for our news, and media coverage, but also in our educational systems. Brown vs. the Board of Education was an important moment in American history, in that the integration of different races began with Linda Carol Brown in 1954 and continued for many more decades. Educators in American higher education have long argued that affirmative action policies are essential to ensure a diverse student body, that such diversity is crucial to creating the best possible educational environment, and that the educational benefits of racial and ethnic diversity on campus are not limited to any one group of students ( G...

  Dilemmas in society A greater leader, a priest, and a horse walk into a bar. Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about that great leader. I’m really talking about all the “great” objectively. They could be presidents, CEOs, mayors, etc. There are cases in which they started their careers young, strong and with purpose, but ended up broke, in jail, or worse, dead. An ethical leader takes into account the purposes of everyone involved in the group and is attentive to the interests of the community and the culture (Northouse, 2018, p. 347). At some point, that great leader stopped being who they were, or what they had come to stand for. Instead, they did not leave things off in a better position. The problem centers on expectations, not real, material change where, save in wartime, modern societies have a lot to brag about ( Stearns, 2012, p. 131). The unfortunate nature of our society is that we tend to have more negative stories of leaders in our news and media than we ...

  Consequentialism vs Deontology Is it a glass half-empty or a glass half-full? It appears to me that what separates consequentialism and deontology is perspective. LaFollette (2007) writes that consequentialists must explain which consequences we should count, how much weight or consideration we should give those that do count, and how we should use these considerations when deliberating (p. 25). However, deontology is usually regarded as a foil to consequentialism ( Heinzelmann, 2018, p. 5201). What I find as the takeaway from this situation is that consequentialism isn’t necessarily grounded in morality, whereas deontology finds itself in a set of negative rules. As LaFollette points out with consequentialism, we must look at and use several dimensions to understand and consider what are the consequences of a situation. Deontology doesn’t require this additional gate check, but instead relies on our experience learning right and wrong from the negative perspective. Much like a...

The train dilemma exercise sucks! Understanding that the dilemma is a test, a moral test to see what people would do in no-win situations. I could channel my best Captain Kirk and say that I don’t believe in no-win scenarios, but I’d fail that this specific test because I need to explain myself in what I would do in these tests. Test #1 I’m a train switchperson and a train is about to hit five children. I could throw the switch and kill one child or take no action and let the train kill five children. What to do? We know from this test that if I do nothing, one child lives. If I do nothing, five children die. If I take action and throw the switch, one child dies because of me. If I take no action and don’t throw the switch, five children die because of me. Looking at it from this vantagepoint, and because both my action and inaction would cause death, I would choose to save the five children. Philosophers have maintained that the intuitive position is that it is acceptable to fli...

  I watched the videos by McChrystal (2011) and VitalSmarts (2012) and then evaluated their approaches compared to the textbook by Brown (2011). First, there is a stark difference between the type of leadership that was used in these situations. In the video by VitalSmarts (2012), Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale used transformational leadership to lead his team through change while the company he oversees was implementing new employee training. I’ve learned about so many different types of leadership since I started by graduate degree program and it has been a fun and interesting experience seeing many new forms of leadership. The latest has been transformational leadership, which gives more attention to the charismatic and affective elements of leadership (Northouse, 2018, p. 161). In the video by McChrystal (2011), he used prime examples from his experience in the military, which uses a traditional approach to leadership with a top-down reporting structure. Having come from a mil...