Today in class, Professor Nagarajan asked which historical event launched the personal computer.  My ears perked up, and my hand shot straight in the air.  As a self-proclaimed history buff, any mention war peaks my interest.  When he finally called on me, I blurted, “WWII”, and sat back to hear the story.

To my surprise, he did not recount the narrative of IBM and the Holocaust, but instead chose to say that the PC was developed when IBM decided to aid the American war effort.  I argue that the roots of the development of the personal computer were embedded within the machines that IBM produced to help facilitate the Holocaust.  But I digress.  For this post, I will concentrate on the relationship between IBM and the Holocaust (and not argue which side of WWII forged the development of the PC), as it ties the September 11^th class on business ethics nicely to today’s class on operations.

IBM made the Holocaust incredibly efficient.  Hitler was a diligent record keeper, and instead of going through the painful process of manually inputting entries, the solutions company managed to isolate and identify the Jewish population with unprecedented speed and precision, through automation.  Dehomag, a subsidiary of IBM, compiled a census of Prussians, recording their ancestral information on a punch card.  The information from these cards was then computed and sorted by IBM’s machines (a precursor to the computer) at a rate of 250, 000 cards per hour.

IBM helped identify and record the Jewish population in a nation-wide census, helped ensure the trains to the camps ran on time through automating the process, and helped organize the camp labour.

It is true that the Holocaust would have happened regardless of IBM’s participation.  But IBM made the operation more efficient, and dramatically increased the scale of the massacre.  In order to increase profit, Dehomag (and by consequence, IBM) disregarded morality; Dehomag crossed the unethical line.  It must have been fairly simple to refuse to help the Nazis; in major cities, Americans were protesting and boycotting anyone who did business with the German government.  Yet, the temptation of profit lured IBM to engage in business overseas, in secret.  In fact, the press did not manage to make the connection between the company and the Third Reich.  Internal memos of the company were even “encrypted”.  The language is almost indecipherable to an outsider.

///If you are interested in this narrative, and in how IBM’s involvement was finally revealed, I would encourage you to read “IBM and the Holocaust” by Edwin Black.  It can be quite dry, but the information is worth the time.///

On a somewhat related note, here’s a close-up I took of Mark I while I was studying at Harvard.

Ebola has plagued West Africa before, but this time it has proven to be the deadliest outbreak in history.  So far, the disease has killed 2,461 people in the region.  The government of Sierra-Leone has mandated a three-day lockdown in hopes of containing the outbreak, despite claims from MSF reporting that the lockdown would not help containment.

But because many West Africans are working less, there is a decrease in output, and spending capacity per household.  The economic growth is expected to plummet in Liberia, with a decrease of 11.7%, and drop in Guinea and Sierra Leone, with a decrease of 2.3% and 8.9% (respectively).  This is troublesome, as this hit would set the countries back in their economic growth, which they desperately need to improve living standards and to develop their infrastructure.

Another factor that has aided in reducing the economic output is fear, and misunderstanding.  There have been cases where citizens of these countries have attacked WHO and Red Cross members.  Some citizens still refuse to acknowledge the existence of Ebola, despite the number of lives the disease continues to claim.  Citizens expressing distrust in the government continue to feel resentment and anger towards the authorities: after the 30 August lockdown on West Point, Monrovia, citizen Boakai Passawe said that he felt “cheated of [his] work, of his life”, and that “[when] you have a child to take care of you don’t just go away from them”.

Citizens who refuse to acknowledge this disease need to start doing so immediately: education and recognition are the basis for development and growth.  It is difficult for aid workers to continue their jobs if they are under attack.

Last week, on Thursday, September 18th, three journalists and five other people including health workers were murdered, and dumped into the septic tank of a primary school in Guinea.  Aid is limited, and if we continue down this spiral of denial, the economy will not be the only thing that keeps plummeting.

But we must ask why there is so much distrust in the region.  Perhaps it has to do with the unstable ruling of the Guinean government.  Perhaps it has to do with the Guinean protest of 2009, which resulted in a massacre propagated by the government.  Trust does not come easily, especially if there was no reason to do so in the first place.

In February 2014, CVS Caremark announced its decision to stop selling tobacco starting October 2014, to promote health and well being.

Now, a month earlier than the anticipated date, not only has CVS wiped its shelves clean of nicotine, but the company has also majorly reconstructed the superficiality of its brand: on 3 September 2014, it officially changed its name from CVS Caremark to CVS Health.

Source: http://www.cvshealth.com
All trademarks belong to CVS Health Corporation; my usage of such trademarks are justified within the scope of Fair Use.

Was this seemingly ethical decision of getting rid of tobacco actually cloaking a strategic decision?

CVS, more than a decade prior to this debacle, had established Minute Clinic, a walk-in clinic within CVS stores.  This effectively branched the company from not just providing pharmaceuticals, but into practicing health care.   Minute Clinic is an alternative to waiting at the doctor’s office, or the hospital.  It’s quick, efficient, and CVS’s way of tapping into the practicing market.

Having established the intention of branching into practicing health care, it only made sense for CVS to stop the sale of tobacco.  After all, you would never see a shelf full of cigarettes for sale at the doctor’s office.  In order to gain the trust of their customers, CVS decided to eliminate these goods, and an estimated $2 billion  in sales.  What seems like a lot of money to you and I, is only a fraction of CVS’s revenue in 2013–$126.761 billion, and an infinitesimal amount of what CVS will earn by taking over parts of the medical practitioners sector.

In order to gain trust, CVS cloaked this “tapping into another industry” by rebranding itself as a health care company.  It has cloaked this seemingly ethical decision under what Friedman (“The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits“) asserts is called the “social responsibility of a business”.

But really, CVS could have just gotten Friedman’s approval by not attempting to cloak its real intentions.  What the CEO was doing all along was simply being socially responsible, by the only way a manager should be (according to Friedman), by “[using the company’s] resources…to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game”.