Did I Miss Something?

Managing Enterprise Risk – Week 4 Weekly Summary

Week 4 was all about employment law.  The discussion questions began with a question about vague language in employee handbooks being interpreted by courts as commitments, forming a sort of contract between the employer and the employee.  Other discussion questions this week were about how to react when an employee who drives as part of their duties gets charged with a DUI, and whether failure to comply with a personal appearance policy can be grounds for not hiring someone.

The homework was again based on a simulation.  I’ll skip repeating my usual rant on disliking assignments based on simulations.  If you want to see the rant, check out last week’s post.  The simulation this time involved selecting three people from a group of five for dismissal due to downsizing.  Not a fun simulation, it seems the focus was actually a tool to highlight the variety of anti-discrimination laws that exist today.

I don’t recall anything too eventful happening this week.  It was a busy week at work and into the weekend so the week went by fast; maybe I missed something exciting while tending to my day job.

Teasing out the facts and drifting discussions

Managing Enterprise Risk – Week 3 Weekly Summary

Week 3 brought a curve ball in the assignment.  Instead of the usual problem solution template found in week 3 of a class this week called for something different.  More in line with the length of a gap analysis, the assignment was to create an assessment and recommended course of action based on a simulation.  It would have been rough to come up with a problem solution paper based on the simulation since the situation was resolved by its end, so this little twist was a good thing.  However, I’ve mentioned in the past how much I dislike papers based on simulations rather than scenarios, and this was one of those assignments.  My primary complaint is the amount of time that is expended extracting information from the simulation software rather than focusing on the concepts being taught.  This week was a good example of that. I spent hours teasing out the facts from the simulation, hours that could have been spent on the assigned readings and learning about the topics of the week.

The discussion questions this week were on whether businesses can self-regulate, the role of limited liability in raising capital, and why agency law is important.  The regulation topic seemed to draw the must discussion, but drifted off into a conversation on government regulation in its most generic form after a while.  That has been common occurrence throughout the classes.  Topics that can be generalized down tend to drift there after a few days of discussion.  In this case the conversation started at whether businesses can self-regulate rather than having government step in and end up somewhere in the vicinity of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction (the tenuous link being FCC regulation of broadcast television).

Overall it was a pretty non-eventful week.  A good thing, since I only have so much bandwidth and my real job (the one that pays the bills) was consuming every ounce of time I could throw at it.
 

The Cocktail Party Is Over

Managing Enterprise Risk – Week 2 Weekly Summary

Week 2 is a team assignment week.  I’ve commented in the past on how these are not my favorite.  I understand why, I understand how to deal with them, they just are not my favorite.  This week, the drama over the team assignment reached a new high, and disproved a comment I had made in a previous blog post.  I’ll get back to that in a bit.

The discussion questions of the week were about alternative dispute resolution systems, the details of what makes a valid contract, and contract rescission.  The questions were posed in the form of hypothetical situations and there was a lot of participation around each of the topics.

While the discussion was going on, the team assignment got underway.  Rather than the usual benchmarking, the assignment was to suggest clauses for a contract based on a simulation.  It was a good thing that it wasn’t a benchmarking assignment.  Given the core concepts of the week it would’ve been hard to come up with benchmarking sources.  I worked through the simulation and took some good notes, then deconstructed the instructions for the assignment.  Based on those bits of work I put together a proposed outline for the paper and submitted it to the team.  It was accepted and everyone chose sections to write.  People got busy and started submitting content quickly.  One person was laying back, but made it clear when he would have his content ready.  Another person on the team was anxious to get moving, so he wrote the other guy’s section.  This upset the guy who was originally planning to write that section, and he let the ghost writer know it. 

In a previous post I had commented on the extreme civility present in discussion question responses (I believe I used the phrase “most polite dialog you will find this side of a cocktail party”).  I’m sticking with that assessment, even in light of this minor blow up in the team discussion.  The response was correct, the dude said when he’d have his content in and, as he said, if anyone had a problem with that they should’ve let him know at the time.

Thankfully, there is only one other team assignment in this class.  Any bets on there being some terse comments at the beginning of that assignment about due dates and expectations? 

As a last resort, read the instructions

Managing Enterprise Risk – Week 1 Weekly Summary

Week 1 is usually lighter in terms of workload, but also less efficient due to the general newness of everything.  The result is a bunch of time and effort put in to produce what seems to be very little.

The team selection process for this class was one of self selection.  A couple people have come along from a previous class and a couple rejoined from what have been a parallel track.  The instructor is of course new, a lawyer this time.  The name of the course is enterprise risk, the real subject matter is business law.

The only real twist in the concept worksheet assignment this week was that it was relating course concepts to an idea rather than being related to either a scenario or a simulation.  This took a bit to figure out.  The concept worksheet template has some standard verbiage at the top that I (and apparently other students too, based on questions they raised) skipped over.  It got down to the day the assignment was due and I had done as much as I could but had not figured out what I was supposed use to apply the concepts I was researching.  Someone finally asked the question, but then noted that the professor should disregard the question- apparently they had figured it out.  I hunted around the class resources and couldn’t find the missing bit of information, so I did the only thing left to do—I read the instructions.  And there it was; apply five concepts of business law being discussed this week (structure of the legal system, differentiating civil and criminal law, differentiating amongst jurisdictions, current trends in intellectual property, and a wildcard category) to the topic of music and video downloading.

The discussion questions for this lead-off week were about what role the law plays in how business decisions are made, why business disputes result in litigation, and a opinion piece on if the losing party in a civil lawsuit should pay the attorney’s fees, expenses and court costs of the prevailing party.