Full-time MBA Students Take Top Honor at National Business Ethics Competition

A team of three University of St. Thomas Full-time MBA students placed first in the graduate division at the national Intercollegiate Business Ethics Case Competition in September. Team members Annelise Larson, Dan Jackson and Kristian Olson presented “Micro-Finance and Ethical Advice to Interested Parties” for the win.

The competition was held Sept. 20-23 at the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association’s annual meeting in Bellevue, Wash. It was hosted by Loyola Marymount University, the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association and the University of St. Thomas.

Dr. Kenneth Goodpaster, Koch Endowed Chair in Business Ethics at St. Thomas, and Jim Arnold, professor in the Full-time UST MBA and UST MS Accountancy programs, were faculty sponsors of the UST team.

Larson, Jackson and Olson also were awarded "runner-up" recognition when the winners of the graduate, international, undergraduate north and undergraduate south divisions competed in a cross-divisional final four competition.

The team has been invited to deliver its winning presentation at another ECOA conference on “Building and Benefiting from an Ethical Organizational Culture,” Nov. 2-4, at the University of St. Thomas’ Minneapolis campus.

Also competing in the graduate division were teams from INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France), Seattle University (Seattle, Wash.), St. Louis University (St. Louis, Mo.), University of Oxford (Oxford, England) and the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, Calif.).

Members of the winning St. Thomas team were selected last spring through the Center for Ethical Business Culture’s Ethics Case Competition hosted by the CEBC, the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business and UnitedHealth Group.

The CEBC Ethics Case Competition is one of several ethics education initiatives on which the Opus College of Business and CEBC collaborate to engage tomorrow’s business leaders in the challenges of building enduring ethical and profitable business cultures.