Exercise 3

You have been assigned as the project manager for a new bridge that your company hopes to build in a foreign city. You visit that city with your company’s vice president of international operations, scouting the site for the bridge and meeting with city officials in preparation for making a bid on the project. In a private meeting with the minister of public projects, the vice president pulls out a platinum wristwatch in a box from Tiffany’s and gives it to the minister. “This is for you from the president of my company!” announces the vice president. The minister seems quite pleased with the expensive gift and assures the vice president that the bid from your company would be “positively winning” or something to that effect. You can’t swear to it because the minister’s English is inexact, but it does seem that your company is being promised the bridge project.

You know that your company has a policy barring gifts to foreign officials, but you don’t know that it necessarily applies in this case. In the taxi on the way to the building site, you ask the vice president about the gift. He advises you that policies are “nice words” but that “this is how we do business here” and mentions that the minister and the president of the company are personal friends. He smiles and changes the subject of the conversation, but you are still worried that the gift giving was unethical and might also be illegal.