Business Commons^™

Pulte Homes – Reimagining The Homebuilding Industry, Daniel Chaffin, Susan Jensen

Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Technology

In 2016, William J. (Bill) Pulte, founder, and Pulte Homes’ largest shareholder called for the resignation of CEO Richard Dugas. In his letter to the board of directors, Bill stated the value creation strategy first proposed by Dugas in 2005 had been a major failure. Dugas had a bold vision and intriguing rationale for radically reshaping what he termed the “sleepy” homebuilding industry. Drawing from Toyota and Walmart’s strategies, Dugas argued that Pulte Homes could create greater value by scaling purchasing, improving construction processes, and collaborating with suppliers to lower overall costs while simultaneously refashioning and updating Pulte Home’s product …

Videos To Promote Ethical Decision Making – A Pedagogical Tool, David S. Christensen

Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Technology

"Note that this version of the paper is publicly available and limited: it contains no teaching notes. A longer version of the paper, including the teaching notes, is available through the Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Economics website.

This paper provides a tool for developing the ethical decision making skills of business students. Videos can enrich business ethics education by exposing students to more complete and realistic descriptions of ethical dilemmas and the characters involved. Instead of reviewing end-of-chapter ethics vignettes, students are exposed to interviews and testimonies of real people who faced real ethical challenges. The paper provides …

Hindsight Bias And The Evaluation Of Strategic Performance, Roy B. Johnson

Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Technology

"This article reviews the literature on hindsight bias and applies it to the context of strategic performance evaluation. Hindsight bias, the tendency for people to view an event as more foreseeable after the event than prior to the event, is a well-documented cognitive bias. In evaluating the quality of the processes by which strategic decisions are made, evaluators are aware of the outcomes of these decisions and, therefore, are subject to the distorting effects of hindsight bias. Preventative measures are reviewed and recommendations for further research suggested."

A Case For Teaching Business Ethics In A Cost-Benefits Framework: Are Business Students More Discriminating In Their Decision Making?, Steven R. Cox, Kathy Parkison, Dianne M. Roden

Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Technology

"Based on a survey questionnaire of 299 university students, we find that business majors act more ethically than other majors in some cases and less ethically in others. Business students appear more likely to adopt the consequentialist framework to evaluate ethical dilemmas. Our results are consistent with business students being more discriminating based on the perceived costs and benefits of each case. We find differences in behavior based on active versus passive unethical behavior and based on the identity of the potentially harmed party. This evidence suggests that business school curricula that focus on acting ethically because it is the …

Enhancing Long-Term Retention In The Basic Managerial Finance Course, D. Stuart Bancroft, Larry P. Hegstad

Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Technology

Students typically perceive the basic finance course to consist of a series of complex and disparate topics, each with its own conceptual framework, equations, and graphs. In the absence of a meaningful cognitive structure, they may fall back on rote memorization and find it difficult to internalize financial decision making fundamentals. Some tenets of learning theory offer useful insights into ways to organize classroom instruction for the purpose of enhancing long-term retention of critical concepts and procedures.