The Gray Area of Ethics: A Little Reflection on a High School Entrepreneurship Experience
In every career, there comes a moment when individuals are faced with ethical dilemmas that could lead them to compromise their values. Here’s a light-hearted look at a little mischief that once took place in my early professional years—an experience that provided both laughter and valuable lessons.
A group of associates, myself included, had the opportunity to mentor a high school team participating in Junior Achievement. This initiative aimed to foster entrepreneurial skills among students by having them create and operate a miniature business over a few months. The students decided to embark on a venture selling fruit baskets, which involved sourcing bulk fruits, assembling them into baskets, and delivering them directly to homes in the community.
However, the program’s rules posed a significant hurdle. Junior Achievement had a stringent policy against incurring any debt or liabilities, a measure intended to protect the organization. While it’s certainly a noble intention, it presented a real challenge in practical terms—how could we procure fruits without upfront cash? And more importantly, how could we earn that cash without creating financial obligations?
Our ingenious solution was to require customers to prepay for their fruit baskets. This mechanism allowed us to collect funds upon order placement and then schedule future deliveries—a strategy that, quite straightforwardly, worked well.
But here’s where the story gets a bit amusing—the part that teeters on the unethical edge. As part of our mentoring role, we were tasked with helping the students create weekly financial reports to be submitted to the Junior Achievement office. The challenge arose when we realized that reporting accurate cash collections would certainly rub the organizers the wrong way. To protect ourselves—and our students—from scrutiny, we inadvertently ended up maintaining two sets of financial records.
Yes, that’s correct: we had the “true” set of books recording customer payments and outstanding orders, and then there was a separate, sanitized version for the Junior Achievement office. In a moment of levity, we discovered after several weeks of operating this way that we had created a parallel financial universe, and even involved the students in our little ruse.
Sitting together one day, a few of us chuckled at our inadvertent dual Bookkeeping and collectively decided that since it was working without issue and the project was nearing its end, we might as well continue with our duplicity. This amusing yet ethically questionable experience taught us the importance of transparency and integrity in business practices, while also reminding us that navigating ethical lines can
No responses yet