I recently heard a tale from an acquaintance on mine: seems like a friend of his started work at Trilogy a few years back, and had a novel experience during training. This training occurred in Vegas, and, one night, the recruits were strongly encouraged to lay down a thousand dollars on one spin of the roulette wheel. If they won, they kept the money; if they lost, the $1000 came out of their subsequent paychecks.
The idea here was that the company strongly encouraged high risk/ high reward ideas, and that the personal risk and reward represented by the money lost/won emphasizes this to the new hires. However, it seems to me that roulette in a casino, where the odds are, by definition, against the player, is a poor place to teach responsible risk taking.
Soooo…my question is, has anyone else heard of this procedure, at Trilogy or any other place? I’m wondering if my “friend-of-a-friend” tale is a little garbled, or if it’s true in all respects.
I remember talking about a company that did something like that in an ethics class I had about 3 years ago. All I remember was that the employer was taking his employees down to a casio. I don’t know if it was as harsh a treatment as being forced to lay down a 1000$ on really bad odds, but it was something along that lines. Reminds me of when my Physics teacher took us outside on the first class and burned 26 one dollar bills to show us how much money we would be wasting if we missed class. If my memory kicks in I’ll tell you some more.
My guess is that this did not happen. If the company was trying to teach them about them about risk and its potential rewards, they would pay for them to play, and let them keep the money if they won.
Seeing as Hanzo has already partially hijacked the thread, let me do the same.
I work in an Economics department. To show that the desireable allocative effects of markets are independent of profits, a professor allocated tutorial places by auction and burnt the proceeds. (this is illegal in Australia)
Gee, we did fun stuff when we went outside during science classes (Biology, Zoology, Physics, Geology, and Chemistry). Magnifying lens experiments, photochemical exposure, sodium & water bombs, insect collecting, fossil hunting, archaeological investigation, model rocket launching.
Whoops; I was going to specify, but overlooked it. The bet was on one individual number (so I was told), so the reward was high, but the risk of losing was commensurately high also.
And, to picmr, who states,
The rationale (again, so I was told) here is that the company was trying to teach them about risk, and the loss of the individual’s personal money was a better taching tool than the loss of the company’s money. After all, if you got the reward without taking a risk, what does that teach? This is not to say that I agree with this rationale (in fact, it strikes me that teaching appropriate risk/reward decision making using casino odds is kinda dumb), but it does make sense from a certain viewpoint.