Marc Le Menestrel

From Unethical Business to Ethical Selves: How to eat to be yourself? (Monday June 12th 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2017-05-31T09:47:48Z

Each participant prepares something about the Food Industry (a fact, an experience, a photo, a video, something to eat or drink, anything...) that he/she finds of relevance in the context of his/her learning process.

We share our contributions and experience how such issues can have a direct implication for our life and, most importantly, for our own behavior.

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Voicing your values (Thursday 8th of June 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2017-05-31T09:44:19Z

How to disobey when appropriate?

Watch this 40 min video about the Milgram Experiment.

Reflect on it and look for additional information about the experiment and obedience in general.

Assignment:

Describe for yourself who you tend to be when you fail to act upon your own values and reflect about how you would resist to obedience when it means acting contrary to your values. Write one sentence that empowers you to be the one you want to be in these situations.

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Business, Corruption and the Individual (Tuesday 6th of June, 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2017-05-31T09:42:10Z

Summary

As a newly appointed manager of a pharmaceutical company in China faces the issue of kickbacks to Doctors in order to boost sales, he is not very sure about the practices and the consequences of carrying out what could be interpreted as a form of corruption. How should he behave in such a situation? Why? We follow this case study with a discussion on corruption, its perception, methods and consequences.

Required reading

Butler, Charlotte & de Bettignies, Henri-Claude. “Blue Monday (R)”, Insead and CEIBS Case Study, 2009.

Watch this 40 min video about the Milgram Experiment.

Reflect on it and look for additional information about the experiment and obedience in general.

Assignment: Answer the two questions at the end of the case.

Advice: Think a bit by yourself and then browse the Internet to learn about what happened in the recent years to pharmaceutical companies in China about corruption and use it to build a more refined assignment.

Optional Readings

De George, Richard. “ Ethics, Corruption, and Doing Business in Asia”, in Asia Pacific Journal of Economics & Business, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1997), pp. 39-52.

Anand, V., Ashforth, B.E., and Joshi, M. (2004) “Business as usual: the acceptance and perpetuation of corruption in organizations”, Academy of Management Executive, 18 (2): 39-53.

Slides of the Session

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Goals and Success (Monday 8 of May 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2017-05-03T11:40:25Z

Video: “The Parable of the Sadhu” – Harvard Business School.

Through a case study depicting a Wall Street financial analyst facing a dilemma in mountaineering, we discuss whether success lies in the mere attainment of goals.

We then introduce criteria of ethical behaviour. These philosophical perspectives provide us with foundations to propose an open form of ethical rationality that combines considerations based on self-interest with ethical values.

Reading

McCoy, Bowen: “The parable of the Sadhu”, in Harvard Business Review, Vol. 75 N°3, May-June 1997, pp. 54-61.

Preparation: For you personally, is success the mere attainment of your goals?

Video to watch: TED Talks: Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

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Being, Thinking, Dreaming: The art of Learning (Tuesday 2nd of May, 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2017-05-03T11:24:20Z

Review of the course so far

We review the course so far, the key concepts and the expectations so as to improve the opportunity to learn.

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Guest Speaker Aniol Brosa (April 18, 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2017-03-31T11:16:39Z

Note that I have modified the previous session description with an assignment and a video: available here.

In this session, Aniol Brosa, serial entrepreneur, we walk you through the dilemmas, failures and/or doubts when starting-up a company. Pointing out not only the professional side of team building, strategy definition and execution/growth management but also the personal challenges when reality happens to be far from expectations, either on the positive or the negative side of it.

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Dreaming and Deciding your life (Thursday 4th of May, 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2016-06-09T17:10:26Z

In this session, participants formulate their own vision of success. To this end, they experience an integrated form of decision-making where the heart and soul enrich the cognitive processes.

Reason alone is not sufficient for taking the best decisions. In a world of profound transformation, a purely intellectual approach may even crowd out our most important values and lead us to unexpected negative consequences. At the individual level, or at the company level, it is becoming a must to integrate our values, emotions, imagination and intuition into our decision making.

Teaching to take better decisions becomes experiential as participants are actors of their learning process. Intimate dialogues, respectful conversations, meditation and day-dreaming techniques are typical examples of processes that open minds and hearts towards taking the decisions that a situation may require. Guided visualization exercises are especially useful to clarify and empower our dream beyond our goal and to ensure continuity and value of the process.

Preparation

Take 15 minutes of your time that you spend in a place where you feel safe and comfortable. Remembering people, places or experiences of your past, connect with who you were before becoming the student you are now and ask to yourself, “What were my dreams about university?”. Write down a few words about them.

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Who are you? (Tuesday 4th of April, 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2016-04-11T13:42:42Z

The art of learning starts with asking beautiful questions. Who are we? is certainly one of them and we will share both our answers and our reflections about what it means to ask the question at the practical and theoretical levels.

Preparation:

Bring to class an object that speaks about who you are. Think about what this object says and write down a few words about it.

Assignment

Given the first two sessions we already had together, I propose the following questions:

What do you want to learn in this course? Why?
What do you need for this learning to happen? From you? From others?
What is the talent that you want to rely on? What is the vulnerability you want to explore?
Who are you? Who is the you you think you are? Who would you like to be at the end of the course?

You can choose other questions or select only some of these, as it fits your learning process.

Video

You can watch this video with the beautiful approach of Allan Watts. See also my short piece about Coaching and the Mystery of Existence.

EVERYTHING - Gameplay Trailer | PS4
by PlayStation

https://youtu.be/JYHp8LwBUzo

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Guest Lecture on the Environment (Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th of May, 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2016-03-08T08:51:14Z

Mathieu spent his first 10 years working in multinational organizations from various sectors in France, USA and Spain. He has built a deep understanding of organizational development within the “business as usual” paradigm. He moved to Barcelona in 2004, and decided since then to learn and practice CSR within different department into his former company and developed a high level of enthusiasm for managing people. In 2010, he co-funded Ecodigma in order to facilitate strategic planning towards sustainability through system thinking and collective intelligence methodology. He's regularly facilitating workshop away from Spain most of them for a French company recognized as an R&D innovation center in Collective Intelligence. He's Vice president of the The Natural Step Association in Barcelona and an active member of TNS Network, co-organizing events in Spain and France. He has taught sustainable design in both UOC and UPF.
You can reached me at mathieu.durrande see more (spanish only)

Mathieu Durrande

Assignment

1. Look at the following 3 short videos:

Let the environment guide our development

What is sustainability (Part 1 & 2)

Part 1- Sustainability: scientific & simple definition

Part 2 - 4 root causes of unsustainability?

2. What principles strikes you the most? Why? (bring your prep in class)

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Conclusion and sharing of key learning (Tuesday June 13, 2017)

Marc Le Menestrel — 2015-06-09T13:26:09Z

We share key learning from the course and discuss how this learning can be effectively embedded in the future career of the students.

Assignment

If you haven't done it two weeks before, review each of the classes of the course and prepare a synthesis (300-1000 words) of the key ideas or concepts that you have learned in the class.

How could this be useful in your future life?

Auto-evaluation of the course

Provide also a quantitative self-evaluation of your own learning process during this course:

Between 1 to 5, how much did you prepare before the classes?
Between 1 to 5, how much did you engage in the learning during the classes?
Between 1 to 5, how much did you reflect about your learning after the classes?

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