Dartmouth, the Most Ethical of All

Monday, May 14, 2007

Congratulations to the Dartmouth Ethics Society (DES) for placing first in the National Intercollegiate Business Ethics Competition.

Held at Loyola Marymont University (LMU) in Los Angeles on April 20-21, the conference hosted 36 colleges and universities at the competition, which included representatives from both undergraduate and graduate schools across North America. Among such schools were the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, The United States Naval Academy, New York University, and McGill.

Team members, Ezra D. Tzfadya ‘07, Tatyana Liskovich ‘08, Samantha A. Mandel ‘10, G. Emily Ghods-Esfahani ‘09, and Nikhil Jain ‘09 chose to present the incendiary Hewlett-Packard pre-texting scandal as their case. Under the leadership of Tuck’s business ethics specialist, Professor Aine Donovan, and visiting Dorsett scholar, Professor Jeffrey Nesteruk, the DES worked together to take stock of HP’s corporate scandal. Several Tuck students also contributed their time and wisdom to the DES as the team prepared their case; among them were Ben Flaim, Anneli E. Schalock, and Brooke Szostak.

The HP scandal hit the pages of the Wall Street Journal in February 2007, and the egregious point about which it turned involved pre-texting, which involves the misrepresentation of your identity to attain personal information about somebody. In this case, the identity of members of the Board of Directors were misrepresented in order to attain their cell phone records.

Briefly, the scandal involved corporate espionage at the highest levels of leadership. The espionage was prompted by a leak of confidential material discussed at a meeting of the Board of Directors; it seemed clear, then, the rogue leaker was on the board of directors, and the chairman of the board, Patricia Dunn, resorted to corporate espionage to root him out. Such leaks are financially damaging for any company, and Dunn wanted to make sure HP was not put in a financially vulnerable position, given some of the previous trouble it had weathered in the past.

In their presentation, the DES played the role of consultants who analyzed the financial, legal, and ethical implications of the pre-texting scandal to a panel of judges, who represented Hewlett-Packard’s Board of Directors and Senior Executive leaders; the DES then went on to propose possible ways that HP could avoid such a scandal in the future. At the heart of the solution was the idea that financial, legal, and ethical considerations are not, at their roots, mutually exclusive, though they were treated as such throughout the development of HP’s scandal.

Having made it past 32 colleges and universities to the second round, the DES was now competing against one other undergraduate institution—McGill—and two graduate schools, Loyola Marymount University and Duquesne University. In the final round of the competition, the schools were instructed to focus solely on the ethical component of their cases. The DES laid bare the unethical nature of the pretexting scandal by addressing it from three angles: first, by distinguishing between the spirit of the law (which is grounded in ethics) and the letter of the law (which is grounded in experience and history); second, by discussing the privacy violations; and finally, by assessing the ethics of corporate leadership, of which HP was in dire need during the scandal. After each group presented, there was an awards banquet, and Dartmouth was announced as the champion of the National Intercollegiate Business Ethics Competition.

Dartmouth, the Most Ethical of All

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