BELIEF is NIU College of Business’ integration of ethics into its curriculum. LEAD, a component, is the student voice for ethics
Volume 2, Issue 1
Fall 2013
Email:
lead@niu.edu
facebook.com/
NIUCollegeofBusiness
BELIEF Site:
cob.niu.edu/belief
NIU College of Business students pose atop a front-end mover loaned by the Caterpillar corporation.
Julie Lagacy, Vice-President of
Finance Services Division for
Caterpillar and keynote speaker
for this year’s BELIEF Week.
Spreading the Belief in BELIEF Week
By Michael Silver
BELIEF Itinerary
NIU Ethics Case
Competition
February 21, 2014
NIU Ethics Video
Contest
March 17 April 18, 2014
Most of the stories in
this issue of
BELIEF Briefings were
written by Michael Silver.
The week of October 7th was a busy week at
Northern Illinois University. Not only was it
homecoming week, but it was also BELIEF Week.
The occurrence of homecoming and BELIEF Week
falling on the same week seemed to be beneficial
to students as homecoming tends to be filled
with activities where students could use a healthy
reminder to make ethically sound, smart, and
safe decisions. BELIEF Week is an annual NIU
College of Business event that is geared towards
creating ethical awareness and helping develop
NIU student’s ability to incorporate ethics into the
business world.
During the week, 11 different guest speakers
made presentations to 25 different classes
throughout the college where they spoke with
students about ethical leadership pertaining to their
discipline. One of the more notable speakers this
year was a reformed white collar criminal, Dhaval
Patel, formally of the Warren Buffet Foundation.
Patel’s story was one that truly fit the mission of
BELIEF week as it was one that showed how even
good people can fall down a slippery slope due to
a few ethically unsound decisions in the business
world. The keynote speaker for BELIEF Week this
year was Julie Lagacy, Vice President of Finance
Services Division for Caterpillar.
For those who weren’t able to attend any of the
speakers, our secondary mission was just to create
ethical awareness. LEAD would like to give a
special thanks to Caterpillar for loaning us their
front-end mover for display purposes.
See Belief on page 4
Students and faculty at the BELIEF Week golf promotion.
2
Faculty for Ethics Spotlight:
“Follow Your Belief” with Mona Salmon
By Michael Silver
I got the chance to sit
down with Mona Salmon, a
member of Faculty for Ethics
at NIU, and
engage in an
interesting
discussion
about her role
in Faculty
for Ethics.
Currently,
Mona Salmon
Mona is
the Director of the Evening
M.B.A. Program. She is
an NIU alumnus, receiving
both her B.S. in Marketing
and M.B.A. in Business
Administration from NIU.
As the Director, she has a lot
of different responsibilities
including managing, marketing, recruiting, advising, and
scheduling. Like all jobs that
grant responsibilities, Mona
inherits a responsibility to
uphold the position’s moral
and ethical principles. When
I asked her how she accomplishes this; she advocated
the importance of upholding
the positions guidelines,
always remaining honest, and
most importantly, sticking
to her personal core beliefs.
One of the most frequent
and re-occurring ethical
dilemmas Mona has to face
comes with her responsibility to recruit for the
See Salmon on page 3
Meeting a Corporate Sponsor:
Josh Byrd of Northwestern Mutual
By Michael Silver
Josh Byrd currently participates on the NIU BELIEF
Program
corporate advisory board.
Not only does
Josh Byrd
represent one
of BELIEF’s
corporate
partners—
Josh Byrd
Northwestern
Mutual—but
he is also an NIU Alumnus.
He graduated in 2003 with a
B.S. in Marketing and now
currently works as a financial
advisor for Northwestern
Mutual. He specializes in
financial security planning,
where his main responsibility
is to meet with clients and
prospects to help align their
goals with their actions in regards to their financial plans.
As a member of LEAD, I
am personally very thankful
for BELIEF’s corporate partners, as they have a major impact on the opportunities that
BELIEF can bring to NIU’s
College of Business. Not only
do they supply us with funds
to run events and bring in
speakers, but they also provide us with great additional
thoughts and ideas from their
professional experience.
I was curious to find out
how Josh and Northwestern Mutual got involved
in being a partner, so I
asked him a couple questions regarding the issue.
It turns out that it all
started with Northwestern
Mutual’s office in Arizona.
The office became involved
in a similar program and all
they could do was rave about
it. In response to the Arizona
office experience, the head of
compliance, Josh’s managing
director, and a managing
partner, did a conference call
and explained that getting
involved with a program like
BELIEF was “a hands down
win-win for what our organization is trying to accomplish
by fostering a positive impact
within our communities.
We want to make a positive and lasting impact in
the communities where we
work and live. The BELIEF
program, along with other
highly-regarded corporate
partners, aligns well with
our company brand.” This is
what raised the opportunity
for Josh to get involved, and
as an NIU alumnus, he was
honored to have the privilege
of representing Northwestern
Mutual as a corporate partner
of the BELIEF Program.
Josh truly showed
enthusiasm and passion
towards BELIEF and also
mentioned how he would
have greatly enjoyed being
a part of the program as a
student if it was available to
him. In particular, he was
very pleased with BELIEF’s
ability to foster a core set of
ethical values and integrate
it into the classroom. He
believes this encourages
moral decision-making
that students learn in the
classroom and allows them
to apply it to the business
world. Northwestern Mutual
has also been a part of this
year’s mock interviewing
opportunity by BELIEF.
Josh feels that the integraSee Sponsor on page 4
Bold Futures
and How
Ethics Plays
Its Part
By Nick Bender
Some of the BELIEF
members, including
faculty,
staff, and
students,
attended
several of
President
Baker’s
Bold
Nick Bender
Futures
Workshops. These new
workshops are focused on
improving the university
and are made up of not
just higher-ups; but every
constituent of interest:
students, faculty, staff,
alum, local leaders, and
others of the community
that wanted to help.
One of many ideas that
were discussed in the
workshops revolved
around building ethically inspired leaders.
The piece that stood
out to the most was the
number of enthusiastic
workshop members who
ranked the ethically-inspired leadership
near the top of things
that are of importance
at NIU. Not only did a
majority of the constituents agree on the
importance of building ethically-inspired
leaders, but President
Baker also considers it to
be one of the foundational pillars necessary
for improving Northern
Illinois University in
the years to come.
LEAD Alumnus Spotlight: Wasil Pahuchy
By Michael Silver
One thing that really inspired Wasil to join LEAD was his
interest in ethics. To Wasil, ethical dilemmas have a unique
set of variables that result in no one correct solution. He enjoys this ambiguity as there are no absolutes,
thus promoting interesting discussion and
the illustration of one’s true character. Wasil
first heard about BELIEF and LEAD during
a LEAD presentation that was presented to
his UBUS 310 class. From this presentation,
he was immediately interested in becoming
a part of the organization and sought to
Wasil Pahuchy
become a part of it. After months of dedicated
efforts, he was finally introduced to the group
for an opportunity to prove himself as a worthy member.
It’s safe to say he proved himself with his time at LEAD,
as he took the role of “LEADer Guy”, who was responsible
for facilitating and directing discussion at meetings. He also
assisted with the planning and execution of the 1st Annual
NIU Ethics Case Competition. Eventually, he stepped up to
represent Northern Illinois University, with fellow member
Jill Hayes (now the director of NIU’s Passport Program), at
the 2010 Eller Ethics Case Competition. Even though they
did not place, they represented NIU well. Wasil says they
had a great time and gained a lot from the experience. He felt
they were able to pass their experience down to the group that
would be representing NIU the following year, Sam Kunde
and Austin Shulte, who placed 2nd at the competition.
Wasil is currently an Audit Associate at KPMG and is very
aware that his decisions affect other people. He feels a sense of
responsibility to consider any choices and weigh the impacts
Salmon
Continued from page 2
M.B.A program. She always
remains conscientious of the
standards for admission as
some potential students will
approach her. Some of these
students do not meet the
criteria for admission and
even though they may appear
as if they could succeed in
the program, Mona will turn
them down. This isn’t always
the easiest decision, but the
admission standards and
criteria were developed for a
reason and a major responsibility of her position is to
make sure they are upheld.
She also emphasized how
it would be unfair to those
students who worked so hard
to meet the admission criteria
if exceptions were made to
allow students who did not.
As the Director of M.B.A.,
Mona saw an opportunity to
expand an ethical framework
to graduate students. She has
taken great strides to help
achieve this and has pretty
successfully created a strong
ethical foundation within the
program. The program now
provides all of its students an
ethics handbook. This helps
create a solid fundamental
basis for students to look
upon and refer to ethical
decision-making at any point
during their learning. An
3
of his decisions before acting
on them. He emphasized
his use of the publicity,
mom, and “how does this
make me feel?” tests, in
order to effectively weigh his
options. These are a few of
the tests that the BELIEF
Program recommends in our
seven step decision-making process, and it’s nice
to see an alumnus keeping
those principles intact.
Jill Hayes and Wasil Pahuchy
His time as a member of
LEAD and a student at NIU
is one he says he thoroughly enjoyed. He praises the opportunity that NIU was able to present to him and even wishes he
could have taken advantage of even more of them, specifically
the opportunities outside the College of Business to make sure
he had a well-rounded experience. This is because he often
reflects on his experiences as a collegiate in order to use them
as a reference during his professional career. He does, however, feel confident that his experience at NIU greatly helped in
preparing him for ethical issues that he encounters in the
professional working world.
Although he felt prepared, he
mentioned that one should
always still remain alert; as
you will not truly be ready to
handle the professional world
until you finally experience it. Sam Kunde and Austin Shulte
integration of ethics throughout all of the courses has also
been implemented. Occasional guest speakers will come in
and discuss ethically-related
content during the semester.
She has also taken steps to
reach out and bring some of
the on-campus ethics-related
events to students at the Naperville and Hoffman Estate
campuses. For the last 3 years
the Belief Speaker has been
streamed to both campuses
so that MBA students can
experience BELIEF Week.
Mona stated that the students
certainly appreciate this opportunity and generally have
a Q&A session to further
expand on the experience.
Ultimately Mona feels that
everyone should develop a
core set of personal beliefs.
When debating on potential
decisions, she emphasized the
importance of staying true
to your core beliefs. She has
certainly helped incorporate a
strong ethical foundation into
the M.B.A program that can
help students achieve this.
There is a great opportunity
for these students to further
develop strong personal
ethical beliefs that they will
be likely to follow because
of her efforts of expanding
BELIEF into the M.B.A.
program. Her work, however, is not done, as she still
has aspirations to improve
and expand the ethical
program for years to come.
4
Sponsor
tion of ethics is very apparent
as students at these interviews seem well-equipped
and very professional.
The future of BELIEF is
one that nobody can really
predict for sure. However,
Josh has pretty high praise
for the program and had
this to say about its current
direction. “The BELIEF
Program and its initiative to
strengthen the foundation
of students’ ethical behavior
will continue to grow and
demonstrate ethically sound
leadership within the NIU
College of Business, the
university, and the community. [We are] most excited
about the exponential impact
this program will continue to
have into the future, as it has
already accomplished high
praise from the academic and
professional community.”
running the event. This year
only two people managed to
hit the ball into the ring, but
a ton of people tried and had
a good time doing so.
Overall BELIEF
Week appeared to be an
overwhelming success that
continued to grow and feed
off of success from past years.
BELIEF Week has played a
key role in further developing
the NIU College of Business’
high reputation of ethics
integration. Hopefully we
can continue this trend
and BELIEF Week will
remain an incredible
annual tradition that helps
contribute to our mission of
incorporating ethics into the
College of Business.
Continued from page 2
Lasting Impressions
Northern Illinois University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution. Printed by authority of the State of Illinois. www.niu.edu F093 11/13
Belief
Continued from front page
This was an excellent
way to raise BELIEF Week
awareness as it grabbed a lot
of people’s attention and got
them talking. To continue
a rather recent tradition,
LEAD also hosted a “Take
an Ethical Approach” mini
golf event. This is just a fun
event where students and
faculty got a chance to try
and hit a golf ball into a ring
we set up in Dad’s Pond.
The event is another way to
create some awareness as well
as allow students a chance
to have a conversation with
some of the LEAD members
Thank you to our corporate sponsors
AT&T
Caterpillar
Experian
KPMG
Microsoft
The National Bank & Trust
Company of Sycamore
NICOR Gas/AGL Resources Company
Northwestern Mutual Financial Network
Road Ranger USA
An AGL Resources Company