5. You have been assigned as the project manager for a new museum of modern art that your company hopes to build in a foreign city. You visit that city with the project’s lead architect and your company’s vice president of international operations, scouting the site for the museum and meeting with city officials in preparation for bidding on the project. In a private meeting with the minister of public projects, the vice president pulls a thick envelope from a briefcase and gives it to the minister. “This is for you from the president of my company!” announces the vice president. The minister seems quite pleased with the envelope and assures the vice president that the bid from your company is “positively winning” or something to that effect. You can’t swear to it because the minister’s English is imperfect, but it does seem that your company is being promised the museum project.

You know that your company has a policy barring.pngts to foreign officials, but you don’t know that it necessarily applies in this case. In the taxi on the way to the building site, you mention the suspicious envelope to the vice president. He advises you that policies are “nice words” but that “this is how we have to do business here” and notes that the minister and the president of the company are friends from college. The architect smiles but is silent, and the vice president changes the subject of conversation, but you are still worried that the.pngt of the envelope was unethical and might also be illegal.

Managing this museum project would give a real boost to your career. It could lead to more international opportunities and higher visibility in your profession as well as executive positions at your company and possibly job offers from prestigious competitors. It could also terminate your career if it were determined that you were involved in bribing a foreign official.

What should be your next steps in addressing this dilemma? What sources of information could you consult—about applicable laws, about ethics, about intercultural communication? Who could you talk to? What documents or messages, if any, should you write?