Arthur Anderson Accounting: Integrity Icon Bankrupted by Scandal

Your topics are below. Choose up to three topics that interest you. Submit those choices to the discussion forum called “The Topic Brokerage.” Since each student must have a unique term paper topic, picking three makes it more likely you will end up with a topic of interest to you. However, if overall student choices cluster too much on certain topics while completely ignoring others, it is possible for a student to end up with a topic he or she has not chosen. Your instructors are the final arbiters of who gets what–this will be finalized in class if necessary. NOTE: The short synopses below are there to pique interest during the selection process. Your papers, when written as per the term paper template, may touch on these title themes but also may not. The term paper directions, not the titles below, shape your term paper. AOL/Time-Warner—Dissecting a corporate marriage on the rocks. Enron—Risk-taking culture with a buccaneer business model leads to collapse. Tailhook—Sexual assaults in supportive military cultures that stonewall inquiries. Lehman—Culture of control and conflict wounds firm in 1984, kills it in 2008. ATF—From Waco to Fast and Furious “cowboy culture” shoots (Itself) from the hip. Madoff’s Nemesis—The “man who knew” screams in vain to SEC about 50 billion fraud. FAA—Insuring safe air travel when regulators sympathize with airlines first. Arthur Anderson—Culture falls to partnership chaos and divisive business models. Stanford Group—Dominant personality creates false reality to fool entire nations. HP—Executives lose jobs and moral compass as boardroom battles wrack firm. Disney—Long-term leader past his expiration date hangs on as company founders. Chernobyl—Management structures heighten risk in dangerous technologies NASA—Challenger to Columbia: How to repeat the same deadly mistakes. Dr. Death—When organizations fail to address highly problematic employees. Good Nurse— When organizations fail to address highly problematic employees. Salomon—Frat house culture invents mortgage securities, pointing way to future. The UN—Trades food for Iraqi oil amidst high-level fraud and self-dealing. Hillsborough Stadium—Mass event management produces mass casualties. AIG—Big risks by distant unit sinks firm, zombie owner wants taxpayer payback. Barings—Rogue trader escapes controls, goes wild, kills firm and writes book. CIA Spy—Sheltered problem employee’s self-destructive behavior turns deadly. FBI Spy—Organizational and personal arrogance creates toxic results. Red Cross—Business, image and politics intersect to accelerate the AIDS crisis Morgan Stanley—Civil war in a merged firm. Bears Stearns—Casualty # 1 in 2008 economic meltdown that soon claimed others. Drexel—How allowing your star player free rein can be a recipe for ruin. Black Mass–Whitey Bulger, FBI and Dysfunctional Informant Relationships Update New Orleans: Off-duty Work, Corrections, Sheriffs and Chiefs Goldman Sachs: Changing Cultures and Structures and the New Eco-System of Wall Street Catholic Church in Crisis: Moral Outrage vs. Powerful Hierarchies Note: Class enrollment exceeds the topics currently in play. A few additional topics will be added in the next day or two. Creative suggestions will be entertained at the instructors’ discretion. Starter Sources for Your Term Paper Materials below relate to the term paper topics listed above. The numbering conventions are the same. Number 1 books below relate to the number 1 topic above, and so on. These sources provide overviews of the critical incidents and/or the organization and its major players. These sources can “start you up” but your term paper must be based on a range of sources dealing with the core incident(s), the organization(s), the environment and any subsequent reforms or enduring changes. 1. A. Klein. Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, Collapse of AOLTime Warner. Simon-Schuster, 2003. 2. B. McLean, P. Elkind. Smartest Guys in Room: Enron’s Amazing Rise & Scandalous Fall. Portfolio, 2003 2. Smith and Emshwiller, 24 Days 3. W. McMichael, Mother of All Hooks: Story of the U.S. Navy’s Tailhook Scandal. Transaction Books, 1997 4. Ken Auletta. Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman. Warner Books, 1987 4. L. MacDonald, P. Robinson. Colossal Failure Common Sense: Inside Story Lehman Collapse. Crown, 2009 4. V. Ward. Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, High Stakes Games Inside Lehman Brothers. Wiley, 2010. 5. Dick J. Reavis. The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation. Syracuse University Press, 1998. 5. Operation Fast and Furious was subject to numerous Congressional inquiries. Check them out. 5. W. Vizzard. In the Cross Fire: A Political History of the ATF. Lynne Rienner 6. Harry Markopolos. No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller. Wiley, 2010 7. M. Schiavo. Flying Blind, Flying Safe: The Former IG Tells You What You Need to Know. Avon, 1998. 7. Rick Young. Flying Cheap. Frontline, 2010. 8. B. Toffler, J. Reingold, Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed and the fall of Arthur Andersen. Broadway, 2003 8. Susan Squires, Inside Arthur Anderson: Shifting Values, Unexpected Consequences. Prentice Hall, 2003 9. Chidem Kurdas, Political Sticky Wicket: Untouchable Ponzi Scheme of Allen Stanford. CreateSpace, 2012 10. Anthony Bianco. The Big Lie: Spying, Scandal, Ethical Collapse at Hewlett Packard. Perseus Books, 2010 11. James B. Stewart. Disney War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. (Next item also about long-time leader.) 11. Louis Freeh. Report of the Special Investigative Counsel (Regarding Penn State Actions). 2012 (online) 12. Piers Paul Read. Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl. Random House, 1993. 13. Robert Godwin. Columbia Accident Investigation Report. Apogee Books. 13. M. Cabbage, W. Harwood. Comm Check: The Final Flight of the Shuttle Columbia. Free Press, 2004. 14. J. Stewart. Blind Eye: Medical Establishment Lets Doctor Get Away With Murder. Simon/Schuster, 1999 15. C. Graeber. The Good Nurse, Hatchette, 2003 16. Michael Lewis. Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street. Penquin, 1990. 16. Michael Lewis. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Norton, 2010. 17. P. Volcker, J. Meyer. Good Intentions Corrupted: The UN Oil for Food Scandal. Public Affairs, 2006 18. P. Scraton. Hillsborough: The Truth. Mainstream Publishing, 2009. 18. No Last Rights: Denial of Justice and Promotion of Myth in Hillsborough Disaster. (At JJC Library) 18. M. Stewart-Smith, Scrutiny of Evidence Relating to Hillsborough Stadium Disaster. (At JJC Library) 19. Roddy Boyd. Fatal Risk: A cautionary Tale of AIG’s Corporate Suicide. Wiley 19. R. Shelp. Fallen Giant: Hank Greenberg and History of AIG. Wiley. 20. Nick Leeson. Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank. Warner Books (1996/2003) 20. Judith Rawnsley. Total Risk: Nick Leeson and the Fall of Barings Bank Harper Business. 1996. 21. James Adams. Sellout: Aldrich Ames and the Corruption of the CIA. Viking, 1995. 21. Tim Weiner, et.al. Betrayal: Aldrich Ames, The Story of an American Spy. 1997. 21.David Wise. Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million. 22. A. Havill. Spy Who Stayed in Cold: Secret Life of FBI Double Agent Robert Hanssen. St. Martins, 2001. 23. Judith Reitman. Bad Blood: Crisis in the American Red Cross. Kensington, 1996. 24. P. Beard. Blue Blood and Mutiny: Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley.New York: William Morrow, 2007. 25. Alan Greenberg. The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns. Simon and Schuster, 2010. 25. W. Cohan. HOUSE OF CARDS: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. Doubleday, 2009 26. Connie Bruck. Predators’ Ball: Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders. Penguin, 1989. 27, Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal. 28. Department of Justice, Commission Reports, Media Reporting/Analyses 29. Steven G. Mandis What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) 30.Boston Globe: Betrayal: Crisis in the Catholic Church 30. Nuzzi, Merchants in the Temple Term Paper Directions TERM PAPER TEMPLATE—PAD 706-01—BUREAUPATHOLOGY This template is to be used for organizing and presenting each student’s case. Unless your topic dictates defensible departures, not following the format may affect your term paper grade. Your paper is an analysis of the case/crisis embodied by your topic based on concepts and theories from this course and other courses you have had that address organization theory and management. If you used Organization Theory and Public Management in PAD 705, that is a good source but others sources will do as well. Module One: Introduction and Case Highlights This module should convey to the reader why this case contains important lessons worth studying. Whatever themes you strike—bad policy, clueless management, out of control technology—the reader response you are looking for is: “Yes, that can sink an operation, let me read on to find out more.” This module should resemble a movie trailer in describing broadly the crisis that confronted your organization, how it responded and how successfully the organization emerged (or didn’t) from the crisis. Use any sources you wish in creating this module, as long as you appropriately cite those sources. Module Two: Organizational Functions, Structures and Administrative Processes Describe your “case organization(s**)” carefully. What is the primary business, product or service? Where the organization headquartered? Describe the structures used to direct and administer your organization. Is it a private corporation with a board of directors setting policy? If so, was the CEO also the Board Chair or serving in some other Board role? How independent was the board from management and how effective generally was the board’s oversight? If the organization(s) in your case was not a public corporation but a partnership, non-profit or privately held company, describe the arrangement, along with the structures in place to provide policy guidance and oversight to the chief executive. Was that guidance and oversight effective in the crises your organization faced? If your agency was public, identify the outside entities ultimately responsible for the policy direction and performance of the agency (Mayor or governor? A commission? Legislative officials?). What role did these overhead officials play in the crises that befell the agency? Identify specific administrative approaches in your organization—how much did these approaches define the organization’s view of itself and/or the image it projected to the world? Identify any administrative principles the organization claimed to follow but, in fact, ignored or trotted out only for show. (**NOTE: For topics involving several organizations of the same type identify similarities in their operations, e.g., the hospitals studied are non-profit organizations receiving substantial public funding and reimbursements; hospital management tends to be split between professional administrators and non-profits; medical professionals require/demand substantial autonomy over their jobs.) Module Three: Your Organization(s) as Human and Natural Systems What ideas governed the official relationship between managers and employees? (For instance, police departments have a paramilitary structure where centralized command and control is exercised through a rank system where lower ranking officers must obey superiors lawful commands; research universities are highly decentralized with academic departments, programs and research projects operating with substantial autonomy; other organizations drive performance by closely tying rewards and penalties to results produced by individuals and workgroups.) The critical relationship between management and employees differs by type of organization, and within types–NYPD brass relates to officers differently than do LAPD commanders; Harvard professors likely have greater autonomy than John Jay’s faculty. So describe the unique working relationships in your organization. Then describe how your organizations working relationships affected how policies were carried out. Look carefully at both sides of the equation. What did employees see as the purposes of the organization? Did their beliefs help them buy into the organizations goals? Did management seek to set the organization on a path to which employees could more willingly subscribe? How did any failures in aligning the interests of different organizational elements contribute to the crisis that arose? How did the “culture(s)” of the organization” set the stage for and/or impact its response to the crisis it confronted? O’Hara’s Chapter 5 –Cultural Deviance—offers examples in this regard. Module Four: Perverse impacts of well-intentioned organization structures & processes Identify how routines of your organization(s) helped pave the way for the crisis. Incorporate, as appropriate, references to “normal accidents” (O’Hara, 2), structural failure (O’ Hara, 3) and bureaucratic dysfunction. Do not treat the preceding list as exhaustive. Organizations rarely end up in crisis unless some operation everyone believes is just fine suddenly causes big problems. Highlight and explain any “taken for granted” factors that led to your organization’s fall. Module Five: Quality Control and Oversight What role did oversight units/organizations play in your case? Did the oversight suffer from ineptitude, lack of resources or interference by the organization’s management? When preparing this module, use, but do not limit yourself to, O’Hara’s perspectives on police oversight, which usually equates to internal affairs. In most organizations students will study for their term papers, risk management units, external auditors, compliance officers, quality control systems and/or government regulators were providing oversight. Understand how these different overseers function generally, and in your case, before critiquing their performance Module Six: The Environment of the Organization Describe the network in which your organization was nested–other organizations, stakeholders, clients, etc. How did factors outside the organization help create or aggravate the crisis that was encountered? Describe how environmental pressures made the organization less able to manage the issues it was confronting? Consider whether deficiencies in responding to new challenges resulted from an “institutionalized” situation where an entrenched worldview caused the organization to misread, and fail to effectively address, important changes in its environment. In this part of the paper, draw upon O’Hara’s discussion of Institutionalization (Chapter 7) and your existing understanding of Open Systems, as an organization theory concept, or public organizations and their environment as conveyed in PAD 700 and other courses. Module Seven: The Legal Bottom Line Detail any legal implications—criminal, civil or administrative—that arose from your case. Do this research carefully and early in the process of putting your paper together, since legal action and official investigations usually produce substantial and reliable documentation and testimony about what went wrong. Bring the legal saga right up to the present since even “dead” firms such as Lehman Brothers remain parties to litigation to the present day as their remains are picked over by creditors. Be sure to describe in this section any “resource diversions” (O’Hara, Chapter 7), including thefts or embezzlement, that occurred in your organization and report either the final legal disposition or where these cases now stand. Module Eight: Current State of Affairs—Organizational Reforms, Quality Improvements What is the current state of affairs in the organization (or organizations) that you studied? Is it defunct? If so, detail its demise, and who was victimized by its passing. If the organization turned itself around, detail how, and the role played by new leadership. Describe how any renewed emphasis on quality played a role in any turnaround. If your assessment is that the organization has changed little, explain why you think this is. Term Paper Length: This paper—excluding endnotes and bibliography–should be no less than 16 pages, double-spaced, using the default margins for Microsoft Word documents and Times New Roman 12 point font. Maximum length should not exceed 24 pages, though if it looks like you are going over check with the instructor. Use charts, graphs and other illustrative material if that will strengthen your presentation. This may extend your page count, which is OK, because you could also measure your length by word count, which would be approximately 4500 (16 pages) to 7000 (24 pages) words. Do not focus on page length or even length at all, but on providing the analysis called for by this term paper template. Length-related behaviors that will reduce your term paper grade: Race through the last couple of modules because page 16 is fast approaching; Throw in extraneous discussion to stretch out the paper to 16 pages; Substitute fonts, spacing and margins that reduce how many words can fit on a page. USE APA CITATION: Your job as a researcher/reporter is to allow the reader to double-check and/or follow-up on your case. This requires APA citation within your text and a list of sources at the end. Not doing this reduces the quality of your paper and, consequently, its grade.

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