Rob Lebow, a director of corporate communications for Microsoft Corporation was hailed for his dynamism in the advertisement industry. It is as a result of his need to excel that he sought outside help in conducting an agency review. Mr. Lebow had high expectations in the volume of response he would have received. One company (RGS&H) stood out amongst all applicants. This was a very young company that was in existence for only 5 years. Their business worth was impressive as the business financial standing was strong with over $26 million dollars business worth.
More impressive was the fact that the company grew 65% in the past year. RGS&H was based in England but sought to become a national force, by going after high tech industries. RGS&H further strengthen their level of expertise with the employment of Jamie Mambro and Jay Williams who were previously employed to one of Microsoft’s main competitors Lotus Corporation. Rob Lebow thought that if these new employees had prior knowledge of lotus strategy, this would be beneficial to Microsoft. Although RGS&H was persistent in their pursuits to get the attention of Mr.
Lebow, there were several considerations that had to take place. Rob Lebow’s decision had to be based on ethical, legal and practical implications. The Lockean view clearly states that the information proposed to be traded is property of the Lotus Corporation since the workers were hired and paid for their labour, and in the same instance the products being produced and sold do not belong to the worker but the Corporation. If this information is used then Lotus would be placed in an unfair competitive position.
Therefore the disclosure might be considered illegal if Microsoft uses the information that could have possible be patent by Lotus Corportation; consequently law suits could be imposed claiming for huge estimated profits, along with bad publicity for the companies involved in the use of the trade secrets. The two employees, though unaware of their boss’ action, were faced with a conflict of interest and could have been viewed as behaving in an unethical manner by giving stolen property to RGS; H.
On the other hand, having been exposed to a level of operation, their experience would require that they maintain the same standard. Neal Hill is clearly an unethical person who has made numerous attempts to acquire the huge contract offered by Microsoft. There are laws that clearly protect information for a period of time whereby a company would be able to regain huge sums of money invested into research and development.
According to the deontological theories the action of the advertising agency would be deemed wrong simply because of the nature of the action and the principles of honesty and integrity and not based on the benefits greed and deceitful actions. On the other hand if Microsoft uses the teleological view point then the short term benefits would be huge, but once Lotus discovers this action then a law suit would be sure to claim all the millions of potential revenue lost along with the negative publicity damaging the company’s good will.