The Ethical Dilemma of Mentorship: A Lighthearted Look at a Career Mishap
In the world of business, ethical considerations can often lead to amusing, yet perplexing, situations. An incident from my experience volunteering as a mentor for a Junior Achievement team really highlights how the lines between right and wrong can blur in unexpected ways.
As part of a community initiative, a group of second and third-year associates and I took on the responsibility of mentoring a team of high school students tasked with running a small business. Their project involved selling fruit baskets—a delightful idea that brought together fresh produce and local deliveries.
However, as we dove into the planning stages, we quickly encountered a significant challenge imposed by Junior Achievement: the business was not allowed to incur any debt. While this rule was meant to protect the organization, it presented a major hurdle for our budding entrepreneurs. You see, the requirement effectively meant we could not establish any liabilities, making it nearly impossible to purchase the fruit necessary for our baskets. But how could we secure the funds to buy the fruit without accumulating any debts?
In a clever yet slightly dubious twist, we decided to require customers to prepay for their fruit baskets. This allowed us to collect funds upon receiving orders, and we could then deliver the baskets a couple of weeks later. From a practical standpoint, this strategy was quite effective.
Here’s where things took a humorous turn: as part of the mentoring process, we were also responsible for preparing weekly financial reports that had to be submitted to the Junior Achievement office. If our actual financials, which showcased cash collections and deferred revenue, were ever revealed, it would surely cause a stir among the office staff. Determined to maintain our ruse while also keeping accurate records for our team, we inadvertently found ourselves maintaining two distinct sets of financial records.
This led to an amusing realization one day during a casual discussion: we had stumbled into a situation where we were essentially managing two sets of books. One set was our “real” version, which we used to track who had paid for their fruit baskets and who was still owed a delivery, while the other set was the somewhat sanitized version we planned to submit for review.
For a few weeks, we carried on with this dual Accounting, sharing the experience with the students we were mentoring. By the time we recognized the ethical quagmire we’d waded into, we had only a short duration left in the project. We ultimately decided to continue our misadventure until its
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