Ginny Pocock, a recent graduate of New York University, is a first-year associate with the McBain Consulting Group. The partner in charge of a major strategy study for an important new client in the shipping business has asked Pocock to call low-level employees in competing shipping companies to gather competitive data to be used to devise a winning strategy for the client. She was instructed not to identify the client but to introduce herself as a consultant doing an analysis of the shipping industry.
Assume that Pocock knows that senior managers in the competing firms would consider the data she is collecting proprietary and would not talk with her at all if they knew that she worked for a direct competitor. Is it ethical for Pocock to question the lower-level employees without revealing that she is working for a direct competitor? What should she do if after telling the partner that she considers it unethical to make the calls, she is told that consultants do this all the time and that refusal to do it would be a career-limiting move?