The Ethical Dilemma: A Tale of Lessons from Junior Achievement

In the world of mentorship and career development, it’s not uncommon to stumble upon ethically ambiguous situations that test our moral compass. One amusing yet eye-opening experience from my tenure as a mentor in a high school Junior Achievement program exemplifies this perfectly.

Our team, comprised of eager second- and third-year associates, took on the challenge of guiding a group of high school students as they embarked on a project to develop a small business. The goal? To create and sell fruit baskets in our local community over the course of a couple of months. It sounded straightforward, but soon enough, we were faced with a rather imposing barrier: the rules set forth by Junior Achievement prohibited taking on any debt, or, in practical terms, creating any liabilities.

While we understood the intent behind the rule—to protect the organization—we quickly realized that it posed a significant challenge to our budding entrepreneurs. We needed to acquire fruit for our baskets, but without a method to secure capital, we were stuck in a dilemma. How could we buy fruit upfront without incurring debt, and how could we generate revenue without assuming liabilities?

Our solution? We decided to require our customers to prepay for their orders. This worked brilliantly in practice; we sold the fruit baskets and collected payments upon receiving the orders, with the promise of delivery a few weeks later. From a business standpoint, it was an effective strategy.

However, the comedic twist arose when we reached the stage of creating weekly financial reports for Junior Achievement. These needed to accurately reflect our business operations, but our actual cash collections and the resulting deferred revenue posed a significant risk of raising eyebrows at the regional office. In an effort to maintain transparency—and evade potential backlash—we found ourselves in a rather ironic predicament: we kept two sets of financial records.

Without any malicious intent, we had created one “real” set of books for our internal tracking and another sanitized version to submit to Junior Achievement for auditing purposes. What started as an innocent oversight soon became an accepted norm among our team and the students. The realization of our creative Bookkeeping dawned on us one day during a casual conversation: “Wow, we’re really maintaining two sets of books.” Acknowledging that this approach was working for us, we decided to continue this way through the end of the project.

The experience presented a unique blend of humor and ethical reflection, illustrating how easily the lines can blur in a business context. While this story may evoke