Written for University of Oregon's Master of Business Administration application.

As an aspiring business leader, how will you prevent financial manipulation, improper accounting, and fraud in your company?

Financial manipulation, improper accounting, and fraud within companies are by-products of an era in which contemporary thought supported the illusion that “business” and “personal” were distinct. In fact, they are intimately tied. The best way to mitigate the negative outcomes of this misconception is to nurture a professional environment that values integrity and long-term profit, rather than allowing short-term profit to be the sole measure of success. This seems like an obvious point. However, as companies have exploded in scale, clear communication between all parties has become increasingly cumbersome. This ultimately leads to a breakdown in sense of ownership, loyalty, and responsibility between the individual, the company, and the community, culminating in corporate fiscal dishonesty. 

To safeguard against future financial collapse, business infrastructures must avoid unnecessary organizational complexity. One pathway is the implementation of appropriately scaled working units, which foster integrity by tapping into an innate characteristic of the human psyche, the bond between group members. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell compares this phenomenon, deemed the “Social Channel Capacity,” with the concept of peer pressure in the corporate environment: that in a small group, “knowing people well enough that what they think of you matters” allows for “unruly behavior [to be] controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts.” Accountability is found within close communities, be it the internal community of an individual company, or the community at large.

During the 20^th century, most technological advancements served to insulate people from one another. With the advent of social networking and its subsequent transformative impact on our society, technology has finally started to bring people back together. Social networks have brought down the barriers between the company and the consumer by making the conversation dynamic and multidirectional. Access to, and clear communication with, the customer make reputation and accountability a primary concern for any company focused on longevity. The ultimate goal of these organizational and communication strategies is to demonstrate and facilitate accountability to the customer through a transparent business model. This approach defines the avenue towards a successful, fiscally responsible future.

Written for University of Oregon's Master of Business Administration application.

photo credit: http://www2.lcb.uoregon.edu/App_themes/Content/Docs/mba/MBA-viewbook2010.pdf

Henry Ford once said: “For a long time people believed that the only purpose of industry was to make a profit. They are wrong. Its purpose is to serve the general welfare.” Many business leaders and economists disagree, arguing instead that industry best serves the general welfare by making a profit and not deliberately trying to effect larger social change. What is the proper role of business in society?

Fueled by cheap, non-renewable resources, industry in the United States has allowed profit alone to guide its course, without regard to the potential long-term, detrimental effects on the general population. Consequently, the United States consumes 25% of the world's resources while representing only 5% of the global population. Logically, the U.S. lifestyle standard is unsustainable. This should not imply that a high quality of life is unattainable; rather, in order to secure a high-value lifestyle for our future, while significantly reducing our resource consumption, businesses must educate consumers regarding the actual lifecycle and cost of material products. The hidden subsidies that make cheap products possible must be eliminated and the long-term well-being of the customer must become the central focus of any organization. 

In the past, political action served to manifest this shift.  However, driven by bureaucracy, the political system within the United States today is ineffective. Instead, business culture has filled this void and become the primary avenue to effect larger social change in the modern world. Just as the concept of “nation” superseded religion as the primary social governing body, business has now overthrown the “nation-state” as the true governing force. Whether we want to accept it or not is irrelevant: business' daily influence on society is unavoidably significant. In part, this is due to the constant, direct consumer access that modern technology facilitates. This power, and the resulting influence, requires responsible action. Considering the substantial impact of industry on both the environment and people alike, an integrated, whole systems approach to “business as usual,” which supports the health and well-being of both the environment and human inhabitants, must become the primary focus of executive leadership.

The concept of Natural Capitalism, as outlined by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins in their book, Natural Capitalism, seeks to infuse an ecological bottom-line into the existing capitalist business plan, wherein both manufacturing and resource efficiency are carefully managed within an ecologically sensitive framework. The authors assert Natural Capitalism’s inevitability within the marketplace: “it is both necessary and profitable, it will subsume traditional industrialism within a new economy and a new paradigm of production, just as industrialism previously subsumed agrarianism.” Leveraging the marketplace as a tool for protecting the environment has transformative potential. Additionally, the concept of Natural Capitalism defines the environment in terms the present marketplace understands, which increases the likelihood of assimilation into existing corporate culture.

Industry must adopt this ecological counterpart while concurrently placing direct focus on human health and well-being. After all, at the individual scale, industry exists solely to provide goods and services supporting human endeavor. Companies should seek to create working environments, transactional environments, and end-products that aim to improve the daily quality of life for both their employees and customers. This approach supports human-centric communities wherein companies become buoys rather than weights.

Written for University of Oregon's Master of Business Administration application.

Please explain how the Oregon MBA program and your preferred program tracks will build on your experiences to date and will further your career goals. Tell us not only what you hope to gain from the Oregon MBA program but also what will you bring to the program and our learning community.

Prior to beginning my career at the University of Oregon as a Master of Architecture candidate, I spent four years entrenched in the world of sales and marketing in the home textile industry. The firms where I was employed designed products for large U.S. retailers, sourcing raw materials and production primarily through India, China, and Pakistan. This experience brought the realities of the inefficient global supply chain model into my daily life. The system relies on lowest first cost as the primary sales driver, delivering low quality merchandise where the true cost of products, both cultural and environmental, is hidden from the consumer. As a sales and marketing professional, I quickly became dissatisfied with my inability to effect any positive change within this system.

For the past two years as an architecture student, I have focused on learning the critical thinking and visual communication skills crucial to generating meaningful solutions to both well and ill-defined problems. These skills serve my long-term goal of becoming a principal in a design firm that contributes significantly to the local and global communities by developing contextually sensitive work. I am pursuing a Master of Business Administration to develop the skills necessary to manifest these design projects as practical solutions that do not rely on an unrealistic utopian vision, but strive toward a feasible, ecologically sensitive future.

Design professionals are taught that an integrated design approach is the only way to achieve these objectives. But, as professions increase in specialization, segmentation of the fields becomes an impediment to this end. This segmentation underlines the necessity for thoughtful interdisciplinary work. Clarence Stein, an early 20th Century urban planner and architect, stated, “an individual's growth toward excellence comes from furthering the unlike excellence of others." Effective leaders must be proficient in the languages of multiple disciplines and capable of relating to disparate personalities. Through my past professional experiences as a software developer within both clinical and laboratory settings in healthcare, as a sales and marketing professional within the global retail sourcing marketplace, and as a Graduate Teaching Fellow within the university environment, I have learned to successfully operate using the languages of multiple disciplines. This is an essential executive skill, which I intend to encourage colleagues to foster within themselves.

Beyond the individual and beyond any profession, our society needs to make significant changes across all areas of human activity in order to secure a prosperous future. Considering the cultural climate in the U.S., which led to globalization, domestic businesses must play a significant stewardship role in developing ecologically sensitive solutions, if we are to overcome the many challenges we face. The only avenue for success is one that seeks to work with, and within, the existing infrastructure. An education in the Center for Sustainable Business Practices will provide me with a solid foundation to continue my career in this vein. The designer must learn to embrace liability and a business-centric focus in order to become an effective advocate for change.