Zelma: Walk the Walk

Walk the Walk was interesting because we talked about the factors that make good people make bad decisions which is something I wrote about earlier. Before going to this workshop I thought that people did unethical things because they were bad people who were being selfish, but I learned that there are reasons for good people to do bad things. Some factors that might influence people to do bad things are when people think that they can defensively say that they’re boss made them do it. I realized that many employees might allow unethical things to happen in the companies the work at because their boss approves of them and because they don’t wan to lose their job.

Some other people might convince themselves that everybody does these things and that nobody is harmed by their actions, but it only takes some critical thinking to figure out that many people are affected by a simple unethical and selfish decision. Dr. Drumwright also talked about moral muteness which is when people don’t discuss ethics enough that they become unaware that they are doing unethical things or they don’t even question their own morality. We also discussed moral myopia which means that people choose not our ambition to be rich or be successful can blind us and we may do things that we wouldn’t normally do.

In the workshop we were given a situation in which we had to decide what we would do, who would be affected, and what factors would make us make those decisions. The scenario that my group had was about a UT student who was a senior who was struggling to pay for college and she got the internship that she always wanted. However, her boss asked her to make unethical decisions and she was debating whether she should make that choice or not. My group decided that if we were in her position, we’d try to reason with our boss or maybe asked if we could be assigned another task. We decided that customers, the company, our boss and our reputation could all be affected negatively if these unethical movements came to the public, but we thought that doing the right thing was more important.

I thought that Dr. Minette E. Drumwright was the ideal person to present information like this because she is a true leader academically. She has won school-wide awards here at UT, written books, taught in educations programs in various countries such as Mexico, Asia, and Europe, and she was recently an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. What qualifies her even more than all of those achievements is that she is currently researching about the social responsibility in business which we all know a lot of unethical things are done to be successful. She told us various stories about ethical and unethical behavior in the business world, but what impacted me the most was a quote that she told us by Elie Wiesel (a Holocaust survivor) and it said that “The opposite of love is not hate it’s indifference.” Then she applied it to the business world and said that the opposite of indifference is ethics.