Classroom Stories & Tips

How I Incorporate Ethics into my Strategy Course

"I teach the undergraduate and graduate Capstone courses at DePaul University, which is the Strategic Management courses, and I wanted to incorporate ethical decision-making into that class. Because at the core of what we're teaching them in the strategy course is how to make decisions and analyze everything that's going on around you. And building in all that ethical decision-making is just an extension of that, and it's important for the students to have practice like they've gotten in other courses within the curriculum but to practice that even within the context of a strategy course.

So, halfway through the course, as students are managing a $100 million simulated company and acting as the CEO or in the C-suite, I pull them out of that experience and bring them into an individual experience where, instead of being at the C-suite level, they're now at the managerial level. In this case, it's the manager of a boutique hotel, and they are presented with more of a 'day in the life' experience. Over about 30 to 45 minutes, they're going to be presented with a lot of different issues—some are more managerial-focused, but some have a lot of ethical undertones to them.

Capsim has a wonderful introductory PowerPoint that I use, and I really tee this up. I start with the 'why.' Why is it so important that we think about ethical decision-making? There is no doubt in my mind that my students are going to be faced with ethical issues at some point in their career. And I tee this up with this great article out of the University of Texas, where it talks about CEOs and why they're being ousted from their companies. And the trends have completely changed over the last 15 or so years. You know, 15 years ago, the predominant reason why CEOs were getting ousted was performance-based, financially based. Now it's actually because of ethical issues. So I say, whether you're at the C-suite of your company or you're just entering your career, your exposure to ethical decision-making is really important and you will be faced with these issues at some point.

So, they get this as a homework activity. It takes them about 30 to 45 minutes to work on individually. And then once they're done with that experience, the very next class, we debrief that experience. And Capsim gives me all the statistics about the class and the students that I need. And we debrief the overall experience to say, as a class, this is where we performed well and these are some areas that we can improve. And I always pick out the one skill that we performed the worst on in the class, and we do a deep dive on that. We look at what are the behaviors that really go into performing that skill, and I bring up different examples. And again, Capsim gives me all of this information in a nice teaching supplement.

The other thing we do is we practice this a little bit more in class as a group, and we get a nice discussion going. I present them with three different ethical issues that I know they will be presented with at some point in their life. Again, this is provided in that teaching supplement, and I just put it into a presentation, and I share the ethical situation. We talk about it in class—is this an ethical issue? Why? What would you do? This creates great discussion in the class. There's a lot of opinions, and we ultimately form an action plan.

Once they're done with this activity, they go back into the Capstone simulation with a totally refreshed mindset about how to make decisions, whether it's through the ethical lens or through the strategic ones they just practiced. It's been reinforced, and ultimately, they're armed with the skills and experience that's going to be critical for them in their future career."