Opportunism

Speaking generally, I think most people think about opportunism in two ways. The positive side, ceasing the day if you will, regards to being in the right place at the right time to capitalize on a business venture or other chain of events that puts you ahead in achieving your goals or benefiting in some way. This closely correlates with “Chance favors the prepared mind” or, in other words, opportunity will come eventually if you keep seeking. The other side of opportunism usually is unethical, like the professor mentioned in the prompt, this maybe looting after a power outage, taking a lost wallet or anything else along those lines. I think the key difference is that we as a society view one type of opportunity as deserved and the other as stolen. In a sense, the latter example leaves a victim while the business example may not. 

Situations like the hold up problem cross into a grey area. Although “business is business” most people find it inherently difficult or uncomfortable to take advantage of a situation just because you have more bargaining power over another party. For example, from an economics perspective it would make sense to sell a dehydrated person in the desert a bottle of water at an extremely high price (supply/demand) but from a moral perspective we would find that situation grotesque. Although that is an extreme example, one starts to find the spectrum of examples increasingly difficult to judge a situation as moral or immoral. In contract negotiation we as a society would say each representative wants to win the best contract agreement for their client or company. At the end of the day these parties are concerned with the bottom line. In this same light, taking on a macro perspective, society does tend to have a problem with opportunism from the corporate perspective. Whether a company takes advantage of tax laws, subsidiaries, legislation lobbying, minimum wage etc. the general public gets very angry. Even though all these actions are in the confines of the law people still think corporate opportunism is wrong and should inherently operate fairly. For this example I think people would rather have corporations willingly pay taxes to help the public, increase wages to benefit lower income earners, reject government subsidiaries etc.

I have been in several situations where I could have benefited from opportunism. From an unethical perspective, I distinctively remember a time in 8^th grade when a student lost his wallet and a friend of mine found it. No one would have known if we took the money and left the wallet behind.  We probably could have bought a new video game, but instead decided to return the wallet. To this day I am still unsure of our motivation, but it was a combination of guilt and putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes. I remember thinking that if I lost my wallet, I hope someone would return mine. This resembles to “Good Citizen” feeling noted in the prompt. In another situation I was working on a case competition to analyze a merger between two oil and gas companies. The material was very difficult due to lengthy industry jargon. The competition had a long set of rules, however no where did it say we could not contact industry experts to ask about the case. Although I knew this wasn’t “fair” and others would likely not take this approach I decided to cold call oil and gas analysts to ask their opinion about the merger. They were extremely responsive and as a result our group took first place in the competition.  We didn’t feel any remorse for acting opportunistically because we were in the confines of the rules and we didn’t personally hurt anyone. For me, I think that last point is key. I would act opportunistically if no one were harmed in the process.