A tale of two stories
The phrase “act on your value” sounds great, but actually that phrase is very hard to implement because we often have to take the risk of losing something. For fear of losing, sometimes we just shrink back. I want to share my two stories. In one story I didn’t act on my value and felt awful and in the other story I gave my voice to my value and felt proud.
Several years ago, I got an internship opportunity to work in an advertising company, which is the biggest advertising agency in one of provinces in China. As soon as I started to work, our company obtained a project from film producer, a project that we can put 5 different companies’ advertisements in the film to raise as much money as possible for the movie from the advertisements. As a return, our company can get a commission as a percent of the advertisement income. Meanwhile our company needed to coordinate with the director for the advertisement forms in the film. A new team was set up direct at the project, and I was responsible for the paperwork and other trivial matters.
Everything worked great, until a tobacco company joined. The tobacco company offered a lucrative deal that our company cannot refuse, because only with that deal, we can meet the project’s financial requirement and got a high return. However, a problem had arisen since Chinese government laws forbid any tobacco advertisement on mass media, not to mention that the movie was aimed at teen – agers. Everyone in our project team stuck in that problem, and I thought we could just give up the deal because it was not only illegal but also unethical. I didn’t take these words out of my month in that I held the opinion that as an intern, I just needed to finish the job arranged by others and didn’t have a say.
Our team hovered around the illegal problem for a week, and then our team director came up with an idea that let the main characters in the movie smoke whenever they were in cool scenes and put a pack of cigarettes near them and removed the tobacco company from the sponsor list. Therefore, no tobacco advertisement was in film and the tobacco company approved the idea.
When I first heard about that idea, I knew that the idea was awful, because teen – agers may imitate these heroes’ behaviors in the movie, and the easiest one to imitate was smoking. I asked my director why the tobacco company wanted to advertise in that movie. He said, “The youths is that company’s future.” When people were talking about the idea at the meeting, I was silent and inside my heart there was a fiercer debate. I knew the idea was wrong and I should speak out, but I afraid that if I did, my director would offer me a bad review for my internship and my colleagues would mock and isolate me. I shrank back.
That movie played for a long time and did quite well at the box office. After its release, I asked a young boy about which scenes did he like best and I noticed that a cigarette always stuck in the main character mouth in these scenes that the boy told me.
When I had finished that internship, I had strong feelings of regret and guilty. I understood that the youth are the future of our country instead of that tobacco company, which actually used tricks to induce the youth to smoke and tried to destroy our next generation. I could have saved hundreds of people from lung cancer, if I speak out my idea and do my best to prevent that movie from being inserted cigarette advertisements.
At that time, I didn’t give voice to my values. The senses of regret and guilty tortured me for a long time.
The following is about another story, which I acted on my values.
After one year of the internship in advertising company finished, I got a job in a bank.
X was the manager of team, vice president of our bank, and I was his assistant. Our team was responsible to find potential customers, which usually big companies, financial institutions, funds, government institutions and extremely rich people, and to sale our bank’s portfolios to them. These portfolios usually consist of securities, bonds, treasuries, fixed deposit and cash.
Through great effort, out team finally contacted an important potential customer Y, who took in charge a big state-owned enterprise’s pension fund, worth billions of yuan. At the meeting, X used an elaborate PowerPoint presentation and humorous words to detail our various portfolios. As Y was keeping asking question about every portfolio’s expected rate of return, everyone in the meeting noticed that Y only focused on the rates of return and overlooked any other related information. From professional perspective, Y was a layman and didn’t really understand how to manage huge fund. Then our team had an internal meeting, X asked us to revise our presentation and to merely recommend these portfolios with highest rates of return.
However, as everyone knows，high rates of return often accompany with high risks. I knew that some of our high rates of return portfolios include treasuries from European countries that had debt crises and junk bonds. Thus, if Y decided to choose these portfolios, the pension fund would have 2 possible results, which either got quite high returns, or lost most of it. As a pension fund, it needn’t get huge returns, just need to keep it value from inflation, but Y didn’t understand that if the fund lost, tens of thousands of their company’s retired workers would be unable to sustain their lives.
I thought it is the time for me to say something. I talked frankly to X about my idea, but X though that was a bad idea, because if any other competitor offered high rate of return that appealed to Y, then our bank my lost a huge commission and several months’ effort of our team would go down the drain. Then we had a violent argument.
At the second meeting with Y, I was not allowed to attend in that X knew that once I got the change, I would speak out my idea. But I decided that this time I wanted to tell Y that there were high risks under our recommended portfolio and suggested him to choose safer portfolios.
Although I knew what I did may have me fired, I wrote an email about my idea to Y in the name of “our team.” At last, Y took my advice and kept invest on our portfolio. After X knew that I wrote an email about everything of our portfolios, he criticized me badly and threatened me that I would be fired if I had done anything similar.
I feel proud. I know I did something that I should do and the feeling from giving voice to my value makes me exciting and happy. I really think that there is always another way to make a different decision and a different result.