What is your name? Jennifer Coonce, I'm an assistant professor of practice in the department of management. I also serve as a assistant department head. Okay and what year did you start at Spears? 2018. Okay and what courses do you teach for Spears? I teach fundamentals of management, so it's the intro management course, and I also teach management and ethical leadership. Alright, where did you get your undergrad and grad school degrees? Oh! I was raised here in Stillwater. I'm an Oklahoma State Alum. I was a marketing major and I also have a master's in business administration from Spears. I love it so go pokes. Go Pokes! 

You mentioned management ethical leadership, so what do you think are the top three things students should take away from that course? The beauty of teaching ethical leadership at Oklahoma State University is we already have kind of a very strong foundation of cultural values that fit into being, not just a good business person, but like a good human as well like teamwork, collaboration, Integrity, honesty, loyalty. Also a little bit of competition is is very healthy and rewarded here in Oklahoma State and Spears, which serves the students well to coming into my course and expanding on those ideas. 

I think one of the challenges that our students face from an ethical leadership perspective is they do have a strong core set of values and sometimes maybe don't understand organizations that don't share their own values and don't understand how to navigate those situations when their own values are being pushed against and how to manage that tension. So that's something we spend a lot of time on class on is ethical decision making and how to be true to yourself, while also being successful in business. 

I've been personally surprised how our students have come to depend on each other, and come to depend on the community here and kind of have an assumption that most of the world works in the same way things do here, and it's just not true. Business is more complicated than that. We've seen in the last five years, a massive raise in fraudulent activity, and so exposing the students to these concepts where maybe people aren't always doing the right thing, and how they can navigate through not getting caught up in that themselves, has been really fun to watch them kind of grow and learn and develop some new capabilities when it comes to decision making. One of the beautiful things about this course is it covers all different kinds of industries, all different kinds of personalities, and all different kinds of leadership styles. 

For the past few years, I've been really obsessed with talking about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. Similarly with Tesla and Twitter and Elon Musk and SpaceX. So I love talking about those kind of like really big story lines, and they really seem to appreciate it when I diversify beyond those two that I really really enjoy. So we talk about Uber and Wells Fargo and um and then we just talk about good people who make bad decisions, and how to kind of avoid being that person themselves.