Business Ethics – Page 12 – education and deconstruction.com

Coronary

The Book of the Week is “Coronary, A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry” by Stephen Klaidman, published in 2007. This book recounts what happens when people are afflicted by certain aspects of human nature: greed, power-hunger and fear. It is a sensational story, the kind even tabloids could not fabricate.

In the 1990’s and single-digit 2000’s, there was a cardiac surgeon, one Dr. Moon, who exhibited the first two aspects in spades– instilling dire panic in impressionable patients, telling them that their clogged arteries could kill them at any second, and therefore, they had to be scheduled for triple or quadruple bypass surgery within the week. Those patients underwent the rigorous, dangerous, and worst of all– in the vast majority of cases– unnecessary procedure, taking weeks to recover, getting saddled with medical bills.

Dr. Moon loved the control he had over people, and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. His reputation was sterling, due to word-of-mouth and great public relations (people truly believed he saved their lives). The hospital where he committed his medical malpractice was one owned by the then-disreputable holding company, National Medical Enterprises (which later changed its name to Tenet Healthcare).

Wait, there’s more! There were other greedy parties involved in the story. Three people saw what was really happening, and found a way to capitalize on the situation. They brought a Qui Tam lawsuit against the doctor and his accomplices. This means they accused him of bilking Medicaid and Medicare out of big bucks by billing the federal government for unnecessary surgeries. They were expecting to reap a large reward for reporting the errant doctor.

Read the book to learn the sordid details and outcome of this extreme saga.

Birthright

The Book of the Week is “Birthright: Murder, Greed and Power in the U-Haul Family Dynasty” by Ronald J. Watkins, published in 1993. This is a cautionary tale about an American public corporation whose founder failed to take steps to secure control of his company. L.S. Shoen “lacked the heart to dilute the shares of his oldest children. If he had issued himself more shares, he could have guaranteed he would always have control or if he had modified the rules, only a supermajority of shareholders could have ousted him.”

The company’s stock situation aside, the story began after WWII, when Shoen started his truck rental business. The business proved successful until his children attained adulthood, at which time, he favored two of his sons, who drained the company’s resources on their expensive hobbies. This bad situation led to a legal dispute among family members over company ownership, that resulted in murder. The newspapers mockingly reported the court battles as a family fight among “the idle rich”, as the majority shareholders were publicly viewed as heirs to the family fortune.

One of the sons was suspected of perpetrating the said murder. This is an extreme story, because even when American family members are fighting over company ownership, they rarely stoop so low as to terrorize the rival camp by killing someone.

The Odds Against Me

The Book of the Week is “The Odds Against Me” by John Scarne, published in 1966.

This is the autobiography of a man passionate about gambling. Starting in elementary school, he exhibited an incredible talent for calculating figures in his head. As a teenager, Scarne gravitated toward performing magic tricks, and gambling. He developed expertise at manipulating playing cards. His parents were less than thrilled, as they wanted him to choose a noble profession.

Eventually, Scarne made a career of assisting law enforcement with identifying rigged games in casinos. In his book, he described a sting operation against a croupier who was using a magnetized roulette ball, and other dishonest behind-the-scenes goings-on in games of chance.

Personal History

The Book of the Week is “Personal History” by Katharine Graham, published in 1997.

The autobiographer was born in June 1917. She grew up in a large, wealthy family, in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Mount Kisco (upstate New York). She attended private schools. At high school dances, “Of course, no boys were allowed so all the girls put on evening dresses and corsages and danced with each other.”

The autobiographer’s father, Eugene Meyer, a business tycoon, purchased the Washington Post in 1932. In 1942, she wed Phil Graham, and took his name. Over the next ten years or so, they had four children (a daughter and three sons) who survived to adulthood. In 1946, her husband was named publisher of the Post. In 1963, she experienced serious personal problems that led to her taking over the paper.

Two of the Post‘s journalists, the infamous Woodward and Bernstein, were the first to seize upon the story of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel (the 1972 campaign headquarters of the Democratic party) by Republican party operatives. Over the next few years, the paper proceeded to reveal the corruption present in the Nixon administration with regard to the president’s reelection and the start of the Vietnam War. The story was extremely complex. The paper was at once courageous and foolish for casting aspersions on the Federal government. For, the Washington Post Company owned television and radio stations, in addition to print publications. These media holdings found themselves the victims of retaliatory action when it came time for the FCC to renew their broadcast licenses.

Lawsuits were launched in connection with the scandals over whether news articles published by the Post, were revealing State secrets that would compromise the national security of the United States. Many people thought the government was simply trying cover up its own embarrassing conduct. As is now evident, the post-Nixon decades saw history repeat itself many times over both in terms of similar scandals and overzealous classification of documents.

There occurred a mid-1970’s debilitating four and a half month strike of the many unions on which the Post had become too dependent through lax management. Before disgruntled workers walked out, some sabotaged the printing presses and thereafter waged a campaign of telephone threats and physical violence on picket-line crossers. Graham got right down in the trenches, moonlighting alongside non-union executives to get the paper out. She also achieved several female “firsts” and provided various examples of how being female subjected her to treatment males would not have experienced.

The Post had its ups and downs through the years. In early 1991, Graham handed down leadership of the Washington Post Company to one of her sons.

Into Thin Air

The Book of the Week is “Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster” by Jon Krakauer, published in 1999. This book tells the story of a group of people (naive tourists) in 1996 who had a burning desire to climb the world’s tallest mountain, yet were ill-prepared to do so. The guides they hired charged tens of thousands of dollars, but the guides were themselves inexperienced in dealing with the trip’s harsh conditions. Among other serious problems, there was a lack of: a) life-sustaining equipment due to poor planning, b) physical fitness and c) adaptation to the altitude among the participants. One thing led to another… Read the book to learn of the tragedy that ensued.

Ben & Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop

The Book of the Week is “Ben & Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop, How Two Real Guys Built A Business With A Social Conscience and A Sense of Humor” by Fred Lager published in 1995.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, a couple of childhood friends who had drifted apart, resumed their friendship in their late twenties. Their work lives were aimless at the time, so they decided to go into business together. They settled on selling ice cream, based on Ben’s life philosophy, “If it’s not fun, why do it?”

Ben and Jerry worked around the clock in the couple of years it took to create a business plan and convert a gas station in Burlington, Vermont to an ice cream store. The 1978 Grand Opening saw the giveaway of free ice cream cones to the public. This book– the owners’ first– describes the trials, tribulations and triumphs they experienced in getting the business up and running, and growing.

Leg the Spread

The Book of the Week is “Leg the Spread” by Cari Lynn, published in 2004. The author interviewed several current and former commodities-futures traders, providing detailed descriptions of their days at the market in Chicago.

Some traders, employees of a broker-dealer, actually stood on the trading floor, yelling and waving paper from the time the market opened at 8am until mid-afternoon. Others traded online. They had good days and bad days.

One female who formerly made a large amount of money on the trading floor before becoming burnt out, had many bad days, both because the job itself was stressful, and because the vast majority of people around her– practically all men– were sexist. In many cases, the way for a female to get ahead besides having super luck, quick math skills and keen intuition about human behavior, was to sleep with one’s (male) boss.

Read the book to get a comprehensive, entertaining picture of the American commodities-futures market in the mid-single-digit 2000’s.

True Story

The Book of the Week is “True Story” by Michael Finkel. It is an unbelievable story about a journalist (the author) and a criminal. The journalist’s future looked bright at the start of the story.

Finkel was assigned to write an article on slavery in the cocoa plantations of West Africa. He discovered for himself from interviewing hundreds of people, that the said slavery was almost nonexistent. He was under pressure to write an honest story, but also one that would sell. He did not want to denigrate the community of media people who had been reporting the falsehood (knowingly or naively).

If he had written honestly, he would have had to explain that his fellow journalists had been lying. Besides that, the word “slavery” could provoke a boycott of West African cocoa, which would only increase the level of poverty. Half the world’s cocoa comes from West Africa.

Finkel ended up sabotaging himself by concocting a story about one poverty-stricken Malian boy (from Mali), a composite of several boys he had interviewed. He used the real name of one of the boys. When his story was printed, Save the Children complained that the story was inaccurate, and his cover was blown.

The story gets curiouser and curiouser as events unfold.

Around the same time, a criminal was fooling around in Cancun, posing as Finkel. The criminal, Christian Longo, knew only that Finkel was a journalist, and had stolen his name because he liked his stories. He had committed the most heinous crime of all just days before.

Read the book to experience the intrigue.

God Is My Broker

The Book of the Week is “God Is My Broker” by Brother Ty, with Christopher Buckley and John Tierney. It is a very funny satire. The story starts with a man who made sufficient money on “Wall Street” to retire at a young age. However, a mid-life crisis caused him to try the lifestyle of a Trappist Monk.

While swearing off material possessions at the monastery, “Brother Ty” still had the urge to gamble. So he let a line of text in a religious tract dictate his course of action in the stock market. The way Brother Ty interpreted the text turned out to be contrarian to most other traders’ advice and actions, but turned out to be extremely lucrative for him.

The humor of this book emerges when the monastery and the monastery’s abbot are revealed to be just as dishonest as Wall Street. The monastery raised money through selling wine that was falsely advertised, and the abbot built himself an entertainment center with the ill-gotten gains. Read the book to vicariously experience the hilarity that ensues.

The Woman Who Fell From the Sky

The Book of the Week is “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” by Jennifer Steil, published in 2010. This is the personal account of an American journalist who went to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, to lead a 3-week training program for Yemeni journalists at an English-language newspaper in 2005.

She fell in love with the country. The Yemeni publisher, with whom she had attended high school in the United States, invited her to become the editor of the paper for a year. She took him up on his offer.

However, because she was an American moving to a third-world country in the Middle East, she experienced culture shock. For Ms. Steil, one of the most frustrating aspects of the culture, is that it is mostly Muslim, and therefore, male-dominated.

Although she was required to wear the prescribed head-to-foot clothing, and could not have her name on the newspaper’s masthead with the official title of Editor (reserved only for men), as a foreigner she was considered a special, third categorization of person, and was treated almost as well as the men.

The newspaper, the Yemen Observer, was very liberal in that it employed female journalists. The females’ families were very liberal in allowing their daughters to pursue a career. However, the females were paid a fraction of the males’ wages, were looked down upon and subjected to a host of societal restrictions.

Unlike the men, the women were punctual, did not take smoking breaks, did not chew qat (a mild narcotic chewed like tobaccco that is the national drug and the center of all social life), and submitted their stories by deadline time, even though they had to leave the office earlier than the men, as they were not allowed on the street after sunset.

Ms. Steil had to teach the group not only journalism, but how to form coherent sentences in the English language. In the early going, she spent many, many hours re-writing and editing. She was extremely dedicated in that she worked around the clock, despite the various, serious problems hindering the publishing of the paper.

She quickly realized that disseminating print news whose quality met Western standards was out of the question. The publisher was unwilling to contribute resources to important areas, such as paying the workers competitively, reimbursing journalists for story-gathering related expenses and supplying them with press passes.

Ms. Steil was forced to engage in a power struggle with a male journalist who had been working there before she arrived. Her standing by her principles of journalistic integrity caused friction with the marketing and advertising department. She would not let her staff write “news” stories pushing goods or services, even if it brought more revenue to the paper.

Despite all of the problems, living in Yemen, with its other-worldly, frustrating culture (for an American such as she), was a life-changing experience for her. She was in love with the people, the food, the architecture and many other aspects of the country.

This book is a good primer on Yemeni culture and engagingly recounts one woman’s adventures in living and running a newspaper there.