08/02/2017
Participation Supplement 9
Today, we talked about ethics. This is a very important issue for any career field and for anybody. Due to the nature of many businesses who want to get ahead at any cost, even if it means completely destroying a competitor in the process by deceptive, unethical means. One of my favorite professors at Western Carolina University told me to follow three rules and that if I followed them, then I would excel at any job. Those three rules are: one, don’t gossip; two, be on time; and three, do what you are supposed to be doing. I completely agree. I believe that the most important of these is the first one, don’t gossip. When you gossip or slander someone or some company’s name, your credibility and trustworthiness goes out the window. People will think “If he is saying that about this employee, what is he saying about me when I am not around?” We also touched on this in class, except we used the term “bad mouthing,” which is the exact same thing as gossip. I think of gossip / bad mouthing as saying something about someone to someone else who has no control over the situation, and it is always negative. If it were positive, it wouldn’t be gossip, it would be a praise. We talked about how during an interview if you are bad mouthing your previous company, the company you are interviewing with may not hire you because they fear that you will eventually openly complain about them and embarrass them or make them look bad. We also talked about how people lie with statistics. This is an interesting topic that is unfortunately engaged in a lot. We looked explicitly at terms mean, median and mode and how the lay audience will derive a different meaning from these than someone who has been through math or stats classes. This is misleading to most people. A company or researcher could simply say the median is such and the lay man or woman may assume that it’s in fact the mean or average. It would be unethical for the company to not clarify this. Or even more unethical, a company may claim that the median or mode is the average.