Assignment Instructions/ Description
1. Antitrust laws are intended to limit anticompetitive behavior. As you read, consider whether this intended result has been accomplished and whether this is good or bad for business.
2. Think about all the consumer protection laws and the added costs for businesses to ensure compliance. Have we gone too far with these laws, or do we need more regulation to ensure consumer protection?
3. Governance takes place when the Board of Directors, along with other external stakeholders, creates policy for management and organizations to follow. Review this clip with that in mind, and whether this strategic approach should be replaced by the "holistic approach" advanced by Mr. Smith. One of the issues in this Week's material is the definition of the stakeholders in a business context and thus to whom consideration and obligations are owed. If the stakeholders are owners only then that is one answer, but generally the term implies a greater reach than just direct owners of a business and could include employees, vendors/suppliers, other businesses as partners, even the public. If managers work only for the investor-owners, who are the only stakeholders, then that leads to a different answer to what the obligations are than if that definition is enlarged. How might the obligations change depending on who the stakeholders are? If the stakeholders do or don't include employees, for example?
4. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts assist with ensuring minimum standards must be met by businesses to operate. Given the global warming potential, consider if we need more regulations to ensure a safe environment, or, do we have too much intervention already?
5. Week Six is about our shared goals and understandings, the organization’s relationships with the broader society and world at large. The key word is relationship; “we are not an island.” Regulatory law and compliance, which can be understood both internally as well as externally, is the focus, though the particular law, the framework, we will discuss is Sarbanes-Oxley, better known as SOX. This law came about mainly as a result of the Enron and WorldCom financial scandals of the 1980s. Initially, the accounting profession, which, like the legal and medical professions, considers itself “self-regulating,” agreed upon a principled framework of governance, called the COSO framework. This then expanded to organizational self-governance generally, and then that became codified for publicly traded organizations as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The Enterprise Risk Management framework requires organizations to have and maintain adherence to core values, which then translate throughout the organization in a top-down manner. The commonplace axiom, “It starts at the top” is meant to evoke this. Is it clear to you, in the organizations you are familiar with in your work experience, what those core values are? How are or were those values communicated: formally, informally, or both? Are processed/procedures in place to ensure continuous adherence to those values, and where behavior falls short what, if anything (aside from disciplinary measures) is done to repair any gaps in process and training?
6. Sections 302, 401, 404, 409, and 802. (Discuss which of the 5 boldfaced provisions/sections is the most pertinent and essential to sound organizational governance).
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