About ethics 2 - Assignment Example

Julie arrived late in an ice storm but managed to get to the offices of Wal-Mart headquarters where Wright started grilling her regarding the agency review process. He asked her how she had picked DraftFCB as the agency which would take Wal-Mart on the amount of 1 billion dollars per year account. Julie had interviewed about 30 agencies before settling on the Draft. The questions that the president of the company asked her were based on whether she had allowed any of the agencies to pay for her dinner while she was talking to them.

he also asked her of whether she had agreed to be carried in one of the cars that belonged to those agencies (Salmon, 2012). Four days after the interview had taken place, Juulie Roehm was fired because she had violated the strict ethcs policy that had been set for all Wal-Mart’s employees. As Wal-Mart expert stated, “Wal-Mart had a kind of unbending almost obsessive adherence to even the trivialist elements of an ethical code. They are a brutal competitor and everybody acknowledged that.

However, Wal-Mart was also the company that wouldn’t take a dinner from you, that wouldn’t let you provide a soda if you went to meet them to talk about business, where they wouldn’t join trade associations for many, many years because they didn’t want to pay dues and have a conflict of interest” (Salmon, 2012). It is well known that Castro-Wright, who was the president, was responsible for the corruption scandal that happened in Walmex. This brought up an important question. Did the corruption that occurred in one of Wal-Mart’s chains occur irrespective of Wal-Marts strict ethics code?

The point of contention here is that Wal-Mart left essentially nothing to the discretion of its employees showing that is did not trust any employee to do the right thing or make the right decision. Wal-Mart had codified everything in the form of rules and instructed that all employees follow these rules to the latter. This issue resulted in a detrimental effect that can be seen in Roehm’s situation just for the fact that she agreed to take a soda (Salmon, 2012). On top of that, the senior executives of Wal-Mart were expected to have high levels of discretion when it came to ensuring that those rules were strictly implemented.

Therefore, for a person like Roehm who failed to reach that level of discretion was easily fired. On the other hand, when it came to investigations of the conduct of the company’s president it was easy to give the roles of the investigation to one of his loyal subordinates who did what the president expected him to do and burry the case. Accepting dinner is not in any way illegal. However, engaging in sham investigations is illegal. In Wal-Mart, the allegations of the corrupt deals that happened at the Mexican chain, Walmex, ought to have been taken more seriously than what Roehm did.

However, the executives at Wal-Mart saw the world in black and white and failed to differentiate between unethical behavior and an illegal conduct. As a result, Wal-Mart executives were liable for criminal charges. This issue presents a conflict of int