Reference no: EM131606404

Policy memorandum: At the end of the course, students will submit a 15- to 20-page memorandum to a decision maker, such as the president of the United States, a member of Congress, or a governor, on how to reform corporate ethics in American business today. As we have seen, legislation such as Sarbanes–Oxley has received considerable media attention but has not prevented such significant catastrophes as the global economic meltdown of 2008. Students should be prepared to propose policies that might help ameliorate or prevent corporate ethics lapses that might occur in the future. Students will have the freedom to select any policy avenues that they think might help to strengthen and fortify corporate ethics, and their memos should set forth why their chosen policy pathways are important, articulate their ideas on how to remedy the issue of corporate malfeasance, and proffer some recommendations to the decision maker about how to improve overall corporate governance. A student’s prescription for change is not nearly as important as a student’s ability to forecast potential challenges to the corporate board room and to predict possible ways the government could intervene to assist not only solid corporate governance but also the interests of individual shareholders. Be creative, synthesize course materials, and postulate ways to improve the corporate governance landscape from an ethical perspective. 1) You have enormous leeway to craft the headings for your Final Paper. You can write your paper as a standard paper. If you want to create subheadings, I would prefer them in this order: Executive Summary, Problem Statement, Alternatives, and Recommendations. 2) That being said, there is an enormous range of other headings that could work. The gist is to clearly and briefly lay out the issue and your recommendation in a summary up front, and then describe the problem, lay out the alternatives, and summarize your findings. At Harvard, we always worked under the assumption that our Executive Summary should be so concise and "to the point" that a decision maker would only need to tear off the front page of the memo/decision paper and obtain all the essential points you are making in the rest of the document. 3) The key is organization. Make sure you clearly lay out where your policy paper is headed (a big mistake many students make is to write this as a narrative). Assume the decision maker is scatterbrained and needs facts clearly, concisely, and well researched.