Peyton PHlaCe Ethics...

Just to make sure I know when it is appropriate to accept a bribe (never) or a gift that may be misunderstood as a bribe (ooops) I participated in another round of corporate ethics training this past week...

I believe this course is meant as a refresher, because I take a very similar (on-line) course every few months. The example stories and quiz questions are pretty straight forward.

Employee X went on an all-expense paid vacation with Vendor Y while trying to select a cost-effective vendor for Project YNot. Is this appropriate? (Only if vendor Y allowed Employee X to bring his wife and kids so it could be considered a "family vacation.")


Employee Z hinted to Vendor W that he should rework his quote if he wanted to win ProjectNeverEnds. Is this appropriate? (Only if Employee Z provided Vendor W with copies of quotes provided by all competing vendors so Vendor W knew what he was up against.)

This course did not include corporate policy on office solicitation (or if it did I totally missed it). However, there must be a solicitation policy on the books somewhere and someone on the Executive Team must have come across it and decided to take a look. Because this week an email blast informed us that Employee Classified Ads is in direct violation to the corporate solicitation policy and will be discontinued effective immediately (by that we mean yesterday). Bummer, who am I going to buy my refurbished Dell computer peripherals from?

Not 24 hours after the execution of the Classified Ads, we received another email blast reminding us of corporate sponshorship of a certain charitable organization and soliciting (in not such explicit words of course) employee support of this sponsorship. To that I say...when you bring back the classified ads....

...because, you know the next thing to go is Girl Scout Cookie sales...

BTW, have you seen the list of new flavors?