The importance of being honest

It's been a long time since I was able to write something here... Meanwhile life is going on and a lot of things happened, which I wish I could share with you. But unfortunately there are only 24 hours in 1 day, though lately I'm doing my best to make it slightly more.
We have tremendously many things at school - it seems like our professors are having internal competition on whose home task is bigger and how many group projects is it possible to squeeze into one class. The classes are mostly fun, especially microeconomics (all the girls are already members of professors fun club) and finance (the same story but with boys). But my poor brain is struggling with the amount of information it needs to absorb. Career services are also part of this internal competition and they definitely want to win - we have career events almost every night - companies' representatives come on campus and try to tempt us with different career options... In my case, for last 2 days investment banking is the winner.
You can ask what it all has to do with the caption? It's a long and complicated story, but on one of the Ethics classes we discussed Enron and Andersen case and their ethical standards. Which somehow, made me very curios about the subject and I spent several hours searching the net for Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Parmalat etc. Buy the way, their websites at the moment are like monuments to the past, only week echo of their power (they still have the sites, but the only information you can find there is what investors should expect in future).
I read all those articles and thought - it's amazing how persistent the corporate culture is today in encouraging people for governance abuse, at the same time if somebody's got caught how persistent it is in condemning them. Companies are expected to deliver higher and higher results every year, the pressure to succeed is enormous, and somehow honesty in business is completely devalued. People can receive awards today for the same things that will be considered criminal later.
The other interesting thing is how this environment changes individuals. All the guys, who managed those companies, were smart and creative, but the border between acceptable and criminal actions just stopped to exist for them at certain point of time. Which makes me believe that at some level of career development people always have to do trade offs- their soul for the power. Which basically sets boundaries for my career progress (not that I am that smart though)... Today, former Enron CEO is sentenced to 24 years of prison
- what a miserable end of universal ambitions...
But my hero of the day is definitely Aleksey Vayner, the guy who made movie "Legally blond" look like a poor parody. And he was rewarded for the creativity - he is everywhere in the web, The New York times and Forbes are writing articles on him; even Fox included him into news of the day.

What did he do? Just applied for a job at UBS. What's so special about it? The way he did it. He is finishing his undergraduate studies in History!!! at the Yale university and he has eternal ambition to become investment banker. So he sent to UBS 11 pages resume together with the clip on himself, called "Impossible is nothing". In the clip he does power lifting, plays tennis, dances with a beautiful girl and by the way he already wrote a book, founded charitable organization and investment fund.
Please, see the video - it's worth seeing. Basically, he does everything that is expected from an achiever, everything which is valued by investment banks and management consultancies - he just takes it to extreme a bit. And what is the result? He is the common joke for many people. Again society punishes him for the things it encourages...
Ouch, today it's too philosophical - you must be tired of me by now