Today, Wednesday, we had a break from our projects to travel to London for a speech given by a former ACU Alumni, Doug Lacoss, who currently works for Lloyd’s of London. The speech gave a Christian's perceptive into the business world. Mr. Lacoss started out his presentation by explaining about his time in college, and then proceeded to talk about the many cities and cultures that brought him to the Christian life he lives now. He has encountered a few situations which he has had to overcome since working in London that have increasingly tested his beliefs against what can be “tolerated” with the European business sector. When I say “tolerated”, I don’t mean complete morally wrong issues, but situations that are written down as a rule but can be stretched for certain circumstances. For instance, one situation consisted of hiring a new employee and the benefits this employee could bring to the company. However, with European businesses, the former company that employed an associate can choose to hold/employ this person for up to 6 more months, so now the employee “technically” can’t get a new job during that time because they are still part of the other company. Now, this rule is stretched a little and isn’t completely bad if another company starts employing this person. But Doug saw this as a strong moral conflict which, on one hand, will benefit the company very well during that 6 month time span, but, on the other hand, he would be risking his ethics to create more money for the company. This is one intense double bladed sword! There are actually no serious physical consequences and will be very beneficial to the company therefore raising stock holder wealth, every businesses goal, but will add a trade off of his Christian moral standard to make more money. His decision, of course, was to tell the employee that Lloyd’s cannot work with him until his employment is up at his current job. It was a great moral insight into the European business, and the rest of his presentation dealt with similar ideas.
After the presentation we said goodbye and headed for a lovely lunch along the Thames River. Following lunch, about 10 of us made our way around London in search of the US vs. Algeria soccer game. However, we were lost for about 30-40 minutes and missed most of the game because every pub around was only playing the England game. Finally, we found the Texas Embassy where, naturally, the U.S. game was on. However, the “bouncer” wouldn’t let us in because there was not enough room. Even though we saw a couple of free tables, and we even offered to stand, the answer was still no. So, we decided to leave and went around the side of the Texas Embassy to watch the last 20 minutes game through the window. As you may have heard, the U.S. won, and we all celebrated on the sidewalk with locals and tourists watching us jump around and scream as we were chanting for USA. Shortly after the game we walked to the Underground and took the next available train home. Unfortunately, we had to do a little unexpected train/underground changes because all trains to Oxford from Paddington Station were delayed for roughly an hour or two. This made the trip there a little more exciting because once we found a train, we got to sit down on the nice hard ground instead of the comfortable seats due to an overcrowded train.
On Thursday, back in Oxford, all of Nielsen’s team finished preparing their speeches on Wednesday night and decided to travel over to Nielsen to listen to their presentations they had worked on. They did a remarkable job presenting all their statistics they had collected on the three different gums and how each one measures up in the current market environment. The extensive and in-depth marketing research they gathered was astonishing, even to Nielsen who was shocked that their team collected around 600 surveys from the Oxford community.
Following their presentations, the rest of the day was spent getting our presentation together, which we worked on till about 2:30 Friday morning – it was a very long night. Then once morning came around, we brought our A-game to the table and delivered an incredible presentation to Oxfam targeting all the exact problems while giving concrete solutions to each one. After our presentation and the little extra side job, Nielsen spoke to Oxfam about creating a value gum. We all headed back to the houses for relaxation and a few hours of sleep. The rest of my day was spent getting laundry together and preparing for our Rome trip. (Hint of advice, prepare everything in advance, so at the last minute you aren’t running around trying to figure out how to get to the airport. You can always buy direct tickets online to airports for 20 Euro’s, but if you want to save a good amount of money you can book Megabus online to London for 1 Euro and EasyBus from London to either airport from 2-7 Euro’s.) My friends and I didn’t leave for Rome till Saturday around six which will be all covered in my next post. Next stop Rome & Dublin!
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