The link will take you to a nearly 2-month long blog that I wrote about ethical decision making. I listened to Moral Decision Making: How to approach everyday ethics from The Great Courses on Audible.com and then wrote about my thoughts and feelings about a variety of ethical situations.

I enjoyed this exercise greatly both for the opportunity to learn and re-learn many foundational ethical concepts, but primarily because it gave me dedicated time to reflect on how these concepts could and should be applied to my own personal and professional life.

The below passage comes from my concluding blog entry.

I came to two conclusions that are relevant to my ethical project as a result of the extra time that I’ve had to think, rather than to do.

First, just the mere act of thinking and considering the many aspects of ethical behavior and ethical decision-making are an outstanding way to deepen the good habits of ethical thought that I have developed over the year. As I mature I have more and more experiences from which I can explore ethical thought and prepare to make it a part of my own decision-making. The topics do not really matter as much as the thinking and reflecting about them with the express purpose of trying to integrate the lessons into my own framework.

My effort to study shows a commitment to understand and improve myself, as a person and specifically as a student. Even though I might not have a few extra pages of writing to show for it, I am achieving the intent of the assignment and preparing myself to be a better ethical actor.

Second, the apparently disconnected ethical topics are anything but disconnected to my professional life. All of the issues that I’ve considered provide the opportunity to approach ethical behavior from a different angle.

These considerations connect with what the former Dean of the Harvard Business school mentioned in his video. Everything we do has the potential to positively or negatively affect those around us. Therefore, limiting my reflections to certain subjects would be a disadvantage to my full self.

I am happy to keep this ethical blog assignment in perspective. If I’m a little less busy with school work, perhaps that will provide me the opportunity to be a little more connected to my family. I will still accomplish what I set out to do, but I may just have enjoyed the process a little more and some of the people around me may have enjoyed me a little more, too.

Deep dive into publicly available documents surrounding Lowe’s CSR approach.

Lowe’s is one of North Carolina’s largest and most influential corporations. Lowe’s is a 100-year old company that is now a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. In July 2018, Robert Niblock retired as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) after a 25-year with Lowe’s, and Marvin Ellison was appointed as the new CEO. Mr. Ellison assumed leadership of Lowe’s during a period of heightened awareness of racial justice issues in the United States. I wanted to examine the publicly available information, especially around the CEO-turnover period, to determine whether and how the CEO impacted the business and its stakeholders.

I am a shareholder in Lowes Corporation and have been following their corporate performance for several years. I believe that they are a responsible corporate citizen, but until this project, I had never read their corporate governance documents. After this project, I have deepened my respect for Lowe’s Corporation and for the current and past CEOs for their commitment to, “help people where they live.”

“It appears that the relationship between rules and virtues is not as clear-cut as it might seem” Lennerfors and Lungblom (2018).

This was an exploration of a good company with good procedures that still went rogue. The linkages between rules and virtues was not particularly tight - formal systems compete against informal systems.