Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

US & Int'l Papers

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A Winner Never Cheats and ...

Friday September 29, 2006

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From The Southwest Regional
Chamber of Commerce Meeting
Dallas, Texas

The whole aphorism is: "Winners never cheat and cheaters never win." Maybe.

According to Rich Morin writing in the Washington Post, a bunch of researchers have reported, in the latest edition of "Academy of Management Learning & Education," that 56% of graduate students in MBA programs from 32 colleges and universities in the US and Canada admit to cheating in the past year.

More than half the young people who are training to become the giants of industry; the titans of commerce; the captains of continuing prosperity admit to being cheats.

And, according to the study, this is not a new phenomenon. According to the principal researcher in every study over the past 16 years "except one, the business students come out on top.

The verboten activity includes such things as "cheating on tests and exams, plagiarism, faking a bibliography or submitting work done by someone else."

According to Morin's reporting, "A third of the students said they had cheated three or more times; 10 percent said twice, and 13 percent" said they had only strayed once.

The researcher thinks the results are "understated," meaning either more students actually cheat; or those who do cheat, do so more frequently than they admit; or both.

I bring that to your attention to put into context two other stories from the Business Section this week: the sentencing in Federal court of Andrew Fastow, of Enron; and Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom.

Fastow was the Chief Financial Officer of Enron who, according to reporter Charrie Johnson, writing in the Washington Post, "mislead investors at the same time he stole millions." As a cheater was so inept that his wife ended up in the Federal slammer for a year for "underreporting the family's income."

Putting the wife behind bars helped the Feds "pressure her husband to cooperate with the investigators." Fastow testified against former Enron CEOs Jeffery Skilling and Ken Lay who were convicted of multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy for their parts in the Enron affair.

All that cooperation got Fastow's sentence reduced from the plea-bargained 10 years down to six. Skilling faces "decades in prison." Ken Lay died of a heart attack shortly after the end of his trial. Make of that what you will.

On the same day all that was going on former WorldCom chairman Bernard Ebbers reported to Federal prison for a 25-year visit for his part in cooking the books to defraud Wall Street.

Ebbers did not go to grad school. I'm not even certain he went to college. But, according to a former WorldCom employee, "[Ebbers] may not have actively said, 'Book these fraudulent entries' but he created the environment and the culture to encourage that behavior and almost require that behavior."

That "behavior caused the ultimate collapse of WorldCom, cost nearly 20,000 people their jobs and tens of billions of dollars in lost savings and investments.

The "gotta-make-the-quarterly-numbers" environment was what lead to those crimes as well as the criminally-stupid run-up in worthless dot-com stocks in the late 1990's up until March of 2000 when the dot-com bubble burst.

No one person was responsible for all that cheating, but one person does bear at least some responsibility for creating a national environment with a minimum acceptable level of behavior: The President of the United States.

At the time of all that bad behavior, Bill Clinton was President and, as he admitted to all of us in August of 1998, was the national Cheater-in-Chief.

I wonder how Mr. Clinton would have responded if Chris Wallace had asked him about that?

More evidence the Democrats are not prepared to govern; this, from Roll Call newspaper:

"A Democratic aide noted that if the party's candidates win in November, the prospects for taking a majority could increase."

My guess? He cheated in stat class.

On the Secret Decoder Ring Page today: A link to the Rich Morin piece, and links to the Enron & WorldCom horrors. A Mullfoto which demonstrates why I love Dallas, and a Catchy Caption of the Day.

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