Navigating Ethics in the Business World: A Humorous Anecdote

In the professional realm, ethics can sometimes feel like a grey area, particularly in competitive environments. Today, I’d like to share a light-hearted story from my experience mentoring a group of enthusiastic high school students who were participating in a Junior Achievement program. While the tale is one filled with both lessons and laughter, it also prompted me to reflect on the complexities of ethical decision-making in business.

A group of us, consisting of second and third-year associates, eagerly volunteered to guide a high school team tasked with creating and running a small business over the course of a few months. Our clever idea was to sell fruit baskets, where the students would source bulk fruit, assemble beautiful baskets, and deliver them to homes within the community. Sounds straightforward, right? However, there was a catch: the Junior Achievement program enforced strict rules, the most challenging of which prohibited the incurrence of any debt.

At first glance, this rule made total sense — it was a safeguard for the organization. Yet, in practice, it posed a significant hurdle. The prohibition effectively meant that we couldn’t create any liabilities, which made purchasing the essential fruits nearly impossible. How could we buy the fruit without funds, and how could we raise those funds without assuming liabilities?

After much brainstorming, we devised a seemingly ingenious solution: we would ask our customers to prepay for their orders. By collecting payment upfront, we could effectively generate the cash flow needed without falling into the debt trap. From a business standpoint, it was a brilliant plan — but it also led us to a rather humorous ethical conundrum.

Part of our responsibility was to create weekly financial reports for the Junior Achievement office, which would review our progress. However, revealing our cash collections and the deferred revenue from pre-orders would have undoubtedly led to displeasure from the organization. Yet, we needed accurate records to track who had paid and who was still awaiting their fruit baskets.

This predicament inadvertently led us to maintain two sets of financial books. The “real” books accurately captured our transactions, while the second set was neatly edited for submission to the regional office. Even more amusingly, our students were complicit in this little charade. It took us a few weeks of running the operation to realize we were, in fact, managing two separate financial ledgers.

As we sat down one day, the gravity of our situation struck us. We had created a dual system of record-keeping!