Reference no: EM132788369

Topic: Ethics and Diversity

Academic question - You love your job and the company you work for. You have developed some strong friendships and one of your best friends comes to you and asked you to cover for them while they leave early. Your manager has just discussed the issue of employees leaving early in a meeting and the problem with that in your last team meeting. What do you do and why?

Business Question -

In business, all shareholders are stakeholders but not all stakeholders are shareholders. How leaders balance stakeholders and shareholders is often instructional when considering business ethics.

Consider two leaders at opposite ends of the spectrum who died in the last couple of years in Dallas:

Herb Kelleher, a founder, and CEO of Southwest Airlines. He is quoted as saying "The business of business is people. If you take care of your internal customers (employees) they will take care of the rest." The Dallas Convention Center could not accommodate the thousands of employees who wanted to attend his memorial service. Employees paid for a full page in the Dallas Morning News honoring, praising, and thanking him. So did aircraft manufacturer Boeing.

Boone Pickens was among the first corporate raiders (now hiding under the term Private Equity firms) and the first to espouse in the 1970's that the only stakeholder was the shareholder. Tens of thousands of former employees of companies he gutted for their assets would likely have paid to dance on his grave.

Interestingly, both were highly successful and role models in different ways.

As a business leader, which of them would you prefer to model? Why? What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches?