Points 410Assignment 3 Capstone Research ProjectCriteriaUn.docx

Points: 410
Assignment 3: Capstone Research Project
Criteria
Unacceptable
Below 70% F
Fair
70-79% C
Proficient
80-89% B
Exemplary
90-100% A
1. As the consultant, create an argument that you will present to
the CEO that suggests accounting and financial management
knowledge and skills will be essential to the company’s success
and stability over the next five (5) years. Provide support for
your argument.
Weight: 5%
Did not submit or incompletely created an argument that you
will present to the CEO that suggests accounting and financial
management knowledge and skills will be essential to the
company’s success and stability over the next five (5) years, as
the consultant. Did not submit or incompletely provided support
for your argument.
Partially created an argument that you will present to the CEO
that suggests accounting and financial management knowledge
and skills will be essential to the company’s success and
stability over the next five (5) years, as the consultant. Partially
provided support for your argument.
Satisfactorily created an argument that you will present to the
CEO that suggests accounting and financial management
and stability over the next five (5) years, as the consultant.
Satisfactorily provided support for your argument.
Thoroughly created an argument that you will present to the

CEO that suggests accounting and financial management
and stability over the next five (5) years, as the consultant.
Thoroughly provided support for your argument.
2. Suggest to the CEO how the company’s stakeholders
(investors, lenders, and employees) will use financial statement
information and ratio calculations to make key determinations
related to the financial condition and operational efficiency of
the company. Provide support for your rationale.
Weight: 5%
Did not submit or incompletely suggested to the CEO how the
company’s stakeholders (investors, lenders, and employees) will
use financial statement information and ratio calculations to
make key determinations related to the financial condition and
operational efficiency of the company. Did not submit or
incompletely provided support for your rationale.
Partially suggested to the CEO how the company’s stakeholders
(investors, lenders, and employees) will use financial statement
information and ratio calculations to make key determinations
related to the financial condition and operational efficiency of
the company. Partially provided support for your rationale.
Satisfactorily suggested to the CEO how the company’s
stakeholders (investors, lenders, and employees) will use
financial statement information and ratio calculations to make
key determinations related to the financial condition and
operational efficiency of the company. Satisfactorily provided
support for your rationale.
Thoroughly suggested to the CEO how the company’s
stakeholders (investors, lenders, and employees) will use
financial statement information and ratio calculations to make
key determinations related to the financial condition and
operational efficiency of the company. Thoroughly provided
support for your rationale.
3. Given the strategy to increase revenue during the five (5)
year plan period, which will need to be achieved through
expansion and capital expenditures, determine which capital

budgeting ratio is appropriate for Durango to evaluate its
proposals for capital expenditures, such as NPV, IRR, etc.
Defend your position.
Weight: 5%
Did not submit or incompletely determined which capital
budgeting ratio is appropriate for Durango to evaluate its
proposals for capital expenditures, such as NPV, IRR, etc.,
given the strategy to increase revenue during the five (5)year
plan period, which will need to be achieved through expansion
and capital expenditures. Did not submit or incompletely
defended your position.
Partially determined which capital budgeting ratio is
appropriate for Durango to evaluate its proposals for capital
expenditures, such as NPV, IRR, etc., given the strategy to
increase revenue during the five (5) year plan period, which will
need to be achieved through expansion and capital expenditures.
Partially defended your position.
Satisfactorily determined which capital budgeting ratio is
Satisfactorily defended your position.
Thoroughly determined which capital budgeting ratio is
Thoroughly defended your position.
4. In order for the company to improve its operational
efficiency, recommend which production departments should
use process, job order, and activity-based costing—all three (3)
of which must be implemented within Durango. Defend your
choice for each department.
Weight: 15%
Did not submit or incompletely recommended which production

departments should use process, job order, and activity-based
costing—all three (3) of which must be implemented within
Durango, in order for the company to improve its operational
efficiency. Did not submit or incompletely defended your
choice for each department.
Partially recommended which production departments should
of which must be implemented within Durango, in order for the
company to improve its operational efficiency. Partially
defended your choice for each department.
Satisfactorily recommended which production departments
should use process, job order, and activity-based costing—all
three (3) of which must be implemented within Durango, in
order for the company to improve its operational efficiency.
Satisfactorily defended your choice for each department.
Thoroughly recommended which production departments should
of which must be implemented within Durango, in order for the
company to improve its operational efficiency. Thoroughly
defended your choice for each department.
5. Create an argument either for or against outsourcing the
manufacturing operation to a foreign country. Your argument
should include key points that support your position. The key
points should address economic and business management
aspects related to outsourcing.
Weight: 15%
Did not submit or incompletely created an argument either for
or against outsourcing the manufacturing operation to a foreign
country. Did not submit or incompletely included key points
that support your position. Did not submit or incompletely
addressed economic and business management aspects related to
outsourcing.
Partially created an argument either for or against outsourcing
the manufacturing operation to a foreign country. Partially
included key points that support your position. Partially
addressed economic and business management aspects related to

outsourcing.
Satisfactorily created an argument either for or against
outsourcing the manufacturing operation to a foreign country.
Satisfactorily included key points that support your position.
Satisfactorily addressed economic and business management
Thoroughly created an argument either for or against
outsourcing the manufacturing operation to a foreign country.
Thoroughly included key points that support your position.
Thoroughly addressed economic and business management
6. Predict the economic and business environment over the next
five (5) years, indicating at least two (2) ways it may impact
Durango Manufacturing Company’s ability to achieve the
desired 10% growth in revenue. Provide support for your
prediction.
Weight: 10%
Did not submit or incompletely predicted the economic and
business environment over the next five (5) years, indicating at
least two (2) ways it may impact Durango Manufacturing
Company’s ability to achieve the desired 10% growth in
revenue. Did not submit or incompletely provided support for
your prediction.
Partially predicted the economic and business environment over
the next five (5) years, indicating at least two (2) ways it may
impact Durango Manufacturing Company’s ability to achieve
the desired 10% growth in revenue. Partially provided support
for your prediction.
Satisfactorily predicted the economic and business environment
over the next five (5) years, indicating at least two (2) ways it
may impact Durango Manufacturing Company’s ability to
achieve the desired 10% growth in revenue. Satisfactorily
provided support for your prediction.
Thoroughly predicted the economic and business environment
over the next five (5) years, indicating at least two (2) ways it
may impact Durango Manufacturing Company’s ability to

achieve the desired 10% growth in revenue. Thoroughly
provided support for your prediction.
7. Formulate a strategy to improve the opportunities for
Durango to reach its revenue goals (i.e., increase revenue by
10% within five [5] years).
Weight: 15%
Did not submit or incompletely formulated a strategy to
improve the opportunities for Durango to reach its revenue
goals (i.e., increase revenue by 10% within five [5] years).
Partially formulated a strategy to improve the opportunities for
Durango to reach its revenue goals (i.e., increase revenue by
Satisfactorily formulated a strategy to improve the opportunities
for Durango to reach its revenue goals (i.e., increase revenue by
Thoroughly formulated a strategy to improve the opportunities
for Durango to reach its revenue goals (i.e., increase revenue by
8. Assess the potential for fraud within Durango based on the
lack of IT controls, and determine at least two (2) ways
Durango will structure its internal IT controls to ensure that
such controls are effective in detecting fraudulent transactions.
Weight: 15%
Did not submit or incompletely assessed the potential for fraud
within Durango based on the lack of IT controls; did not submit
or incompletely determined at least two (2) ways Durango will
structure its internal IT controls to ensure that such controls are
effective in detecting fraudulent transactions.
Partially assessed the potential for fraud within Durango based
on the lack of IT controls; partially determined at least two (2)
ways Durango will structure its internal IT controls to ensure
that such controls are effective in detecting fraudulent
transactions.
Satisfactorily assessed the potential for fraud within Durango
based on the lack of IT controls; satisfactorily determined at
least two (2) ways Durango will structure its internal IT

controls to ensure that such controls are effective in detecting
fraudulent transactions.
Thoroughly assessed the potential for fraud within Durango
based on the lack of IT controls; thoroughly determined at least
two (2) ways Durango will structure its internal IT controls to
ensure that such controls are effective in detecting fraudulent
transactions.
9. 6 references
Weight: 5%
No references provided
Does not meet the required number of references; some or all
references poor quality choices.
Meets number of required references; all references high quality
choices.
Exceeds number of required references; all references high
quality choices.
10. Clarity, writing mechanics, and formatting requirements
Weight: 10%
More than 6 errors present
5-6 errors present
3-4 errors present
0-2 errors present
The Bullshit-Job Boom
For more and more people, work appears to serve no
purpose. Is there any good left in the grind?
By Nathan Heller

June 7, 2018
The anthropologist David Graeber, in a new book, seeks a
diagnosis and epidemiology for what
he calls the “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.”
Illustration by Martina Paukova
Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the
inevitability of February snow.
Justification reports: What are these? Nobody knows. And yet
they pile up around you, Xerox-
warmed, to be not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s
guess, really, including their
authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish
this nonsense. Those people were
wrong. Now, all day, you get e-mails about “consumer
intimacy” (oh, boy); “all hands” (whose
hands?); and the new expense-reporting software, which
requires that all receipts be mounted on
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nathan-heller
paper, scanned, and uploaded to a server that rejects them, since
you failed to pre-file the crucial

post-travel form. If you’re lucky, bullshit of this genre
consumes only a few hours of your
normal workweek. If you’re among the millions of less
fortunate Americans, it is the basis of
your entire career.
In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster), David Graeber, an
anthropologist now at the London
School of Economics, seeks a diagnosis and epidemiology for
what he calls the “useless jobs that
no one wants to talk about.” He thinks these jobs are
everywhere. By all the evidence, they are.
His book, which has the virtue of being both clever and
charismatic, follows a much circulated
essay that he wrote, in 2013, to call out such occupations.
Some, he thought, were structurally
extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet
disappeared en masse, not even
their clients would miss them. Others were pointless in opaque
ways. Soon after the essay
appeared, in a small journal, readers translated it into a dozen
languages, and hundreds of people,
Graeber reports, contributed their own stories of work within
the bullshit sphere.

Those stories give his new book an ad-hoc empiricism. YouGov,
a data-analytics firm, polled
British people, in 2015, about whether they thought that their
jobs made a meaningful
contribution to the world. Thirty-seven per cent said no, and
thirteen per cent were unsure—a
high proportion, but one that was echoed elsewhere. (In the
functional and well-adjusted
Netherlands, forty per cent of respondents believed their jobs
had no reason to exist.) And yet
poll numbers may be less revealing than reports from the
bullshit trenches. Here is Hannibal, one
of Graeber’s contacts:
I do digital consultancy for global pharmaceutical companies’
marketing departments. I often
work with global PR agencies on this, and write reports with
titles like How to Improve
Engagement Among Key Digital Health Care Stakeholders. It is
pure, unadulterated bullshit, and
serves no purpose beyond ticking boxes for marketing
departments. . . . I was recently able to
charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page
report for a pharmaceutical client to
present during a global strategy meeting. The report wasn’t used

in the end because they didn’t
manage to get to that agenda point.
A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls “a shit job.” Hannibal,
and many other of the bullshittiest
employees, are well compensated, with expanses of unclaimed
time. Yet they’re unhappy.
Graeber thinks that a sense of uselessness gnaws at everything
that makes them human. This
observation leads him to define bullshit work as “a form of paid
employment that is so
completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the
employee cannot justify its
existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment,
the employee feels obliged to
pretend that this is not the case.”
In the course of Graeber’s diagnosis, he inaugurates five phyla
of bullshit work. “Flunkies,” he
says, are those paid to hang around and make their superiors
feel important: doormen, useless
assistants, receptionists with silent phones, and so on. “Goons”
are gratuitous or arms-race
muscle; Graeber points to Oxford University’s P.R. staff, whose
task appears to be to convince

the public that Oxford is a good school. “Duct tapers” are hired
to patch or bridge major flaws
that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically. (This
is the woman at the airline desk
whose duty is to assuage angry passengers when bags don’t
arrive.) “Box tickers” go through
https://www.amazon.com/dp/150114331X/?tag=thneyo0f-20
various motions, often using paperwork or serious-looking
reports, to suggest that things are
happening when things aren’t. (Hannibal is a box ticker.) Last
are “taskmasters,” divided into
two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who manage people who
don’t need management, and
bullshit generators, whose job is to create and assign more
bullshit for others.
Such jobs are endemic even to creative industries. Content
curators, creatives—these and other
intermediary non-roles crop up in everything from journalism to
art. Hollywood is notoriously
mired in development, an endeavor that Graeber believes to be
almost pure bullshit. One
developer he meets, Apollonia, had been kept busy working
over reality shows with titles such as

“Transsexual Housewives” and “Too Fat to Fuck.” None of
these shows ever came close to
airing. Oscar, a screenwriter, spent his time working on pitch
précis—sixty-page versions,
fifteen-page versions—and recapping them at meetings where
executives offered self-cancelling
suggestions and obscure, koan-like counsel. “They’ll say, ‘I’m
not saying you should do X, but
maybe you should do X,’ ” Oscar recalled. “The more you press
for details, the blurrier it gets.”
The epidemiology of the problem—how and why things got this
way—is pretty blurry, too.
Graber believes that bullshit helps explain why certain large-
scale economic predictions have
been wrong. In a famous essay drafted in 1928, John Maynard
Keynes projected that, a century
on, technological efficiency in Europe and in the U.S. would be
so great, and prosperity so
assured, that people would be at pains to avoid going crazy
from leisure and boredom. Maybe,
Keynes wrote, they could plan to retain three hours of work a
day, just to feel useful.
Here we are nearly in 2028, and technology has indeed
produced dazzling efficiencies. As

Keynes anticipated, too, the number of jobs in agriculture,
manufacturing, and mining has
plummeted. Yet employment in other fields—management,
service—grows, and people still
spend their lives working to finance basic stuff. Graeber
blames, in part, the jobs we have.
(Politically, he describes himself as an anarchist, but he is the
mild-mannered kind, and his
thinking is generally well-shaded: he’s equally impatient with
free-market hard-liners and the
sorts of people who rage at “capitalism” as if it were a chosen
conceptual system rather than a
name stuck on the socioeconomic fabric woven centuries ago.)
Instead of reaping the rewards of
our labor in the mid-century style, we now split them among
shareholders and growth for
growth’s sake. The spoils of prosperity are fed back into the
system to fund new and, perhaps,
functionally unnecessary jobs. And, though there’s plenty of
make-work nonsense in government
(a while ago, a Spanish civil servant stopped showing up at the
office, which was noticed only
six years later, when someone tried to give him a medal for his
long service), Graeber locates a

tremendous lode of bullshit employment in the private sector.
“It’s as if businesses were
endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the
resulting savings to acquire even more
unnecessary workers in the office upstairs,” he writes.
That is strange. Market competition is supposed to slough off
inefficiencies and waste. Is
Graeber being naïve about contemporary business? Some argue
that bullshit jobs only look
bullshitty; in truth, they are disaggregated, the white-collar
version of the guy on the factory
floor who makes a single metal rivet for an airplane. Graeber
doesn’t buy it. The field he knows
best, academia, had as much of a staffing explosion as any, and
yet the work of teaching and
research is no more complex or scaled-up than it was decades
ago. The hordes of new employees
must be doing something else.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
Graeber comes to believe that the governing logic for such
expansion isn’t efficiency but
something nearer to feudalism: a complex tangle of economics,
organizational politics, tithes,

and redistributions, which is motivated by the will to
competitive status and local power. (Why
do people employ doormen? Not because they’re cost-effective.)
The difference between true
feudalism and whatever is going on now—“managerial
feudalism” is Graeber’s uncatchy
phrase—is that, under true feudalism, professionals were
responsible for their own schedules and
methods.
Left to their own devices, Graeber points out, people tend to do
work like students at exam time,
alternately cramming and slacking. Possibly, they work this way
because it is the most
productive way to work. Most of us would assume that a farmer
who started farming at 9 A.M.
and stopped at 5 P.M. five days a week was strange, and
probably not a very good farmer.
Through the better part of human history, jobs from warrior to
fisherperson to novelist had a
cram-and-slack rhythm, in part because these jobs were shaped
by actual productive needs, not
arbitrary working clocks and managerial oversight. Graeber
laments a situation in which it’s

“perfectly natural for free citizens of democratic countries to
rent themselves out in this way, or
for a boss to become indignant if employees are not working
every moment of ‘his’ time.” Still,
it’s likely that he overstates the pleasures of the freelance life.
Is it possible that bullshit jobs are useful? In Graeber’s view,
they simply reinforce their
premises. “We have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic
whereby we feel that pain in the
workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive
consumer pleasures, and, at the same
time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more
of our waking existence means
that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so
concisely put it—‘a life,’ ” he writes.
His own idea of a life, which includes “sitting around in cafés
all day arguing about politics or
gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs,”
may not be everyone’s. He also
may misidentify the degree to which most people fret about the
nature of their productive output;
for some, work is the least important and defining of life’s
commitments. But his point is that the
bullshit economy feeds itself. Workers cram in Netflix binges,

online purchases, takeout meals,
and yoga classes as rewards for yet another day of the
demoralizing bullshit work that sustains
such life styles. (Graeber’s frame is mostly urban and educated
middle-class, which seems
unobjectionable, since, one suspects, his readers are, too.)
Acculturation happens early. A college
student, Brendan, complains of bullshit jobs on campus:
A lot of these student work jobs have us doing some sort of
bullshit task like scanning IDs, or
monitoring empty rooms, or cleaning already-clean tables. . . .
I’m not altogether familiar with
how the whole thing works, but a lot of this work is funded by
the Feds and tied to our student
loans. It’s part of a whole federal system designed to assign
students a lot of debt—thereby
promising to coerce them into labor in the future, as student
debts are so hard to get rid of—
accompanied by a bullshit education program designed to train
and prepare us for our future
bullshit jobs.
Brendan seems to be describing the Federal Work-Study
Program, the point of which is to help

students offset debt with wages earned on campus. Many of
those jobs are plainly bullshitty. My
own Federal Work-Study gig was in the basement of a campus
research center, and the main
task, as I recall it, was to produce a monthly calendar of local
events. I would compile listings,
mostly from Google, and lay them out in desktop-publishing
software. I have no idea how many
people received the pamphlet, or whether any read it. Still, I felt
lucky: I loved the people there,
and I could get free coffee from the center’s kitchenette. If
anything, it seemed remarkable to me
then that I was somehow dodging debt by sitting in a basement
doing basic tasks on a computer.
In Graeber’s eyes, make-work student jobs educate the young
into lives of bullshit. Without such
demands on their time, he writes, they could be “rehearsing for
plays, playing in a band,” and the
like. The binary is misleading—it is possible to hold a mind-
numbing job and be the singer in a
band—and anybody who has read much student fiction or seen
many campus plays will wonder
whether the bullshit quotient is much lessened there. Young

people may be asked to do
inconsequential work as part of an insidious acculturation
scheme. Or they may be asked because
their higher-order skills are not honed, and there’s benefit—for
everyone—in forcing them to
attain their lives’ endeavors by intent, not by default.
On one of his many feudalism jags, Graeber makes a digression
into youth work in medieval
Europe. Back then, he points out, everybody—rich or poor,
powerful or powerless—undertook
service in early adulthood. Aspiring knights were pages;
noblewomen worked as ladies in
waiting. The goal was to break young people into the world
before they launched as self-
governed professionals. And yet, to the extent that nobody
really needs an assistant to scrape
mud off their boots or move a tray from one room to another,
medieval youth employments
were, in large part, bullshit jobs. Certain work, in this sense,
may be fine, and even helpful on the
road to a self-realized life. The bullshit that destroys us is the
bullshit that endures.
To account for that persistence, Graeber quotes President
Barack Obama on the topic of

privatized health care. “Everybody who supports single-payer
health care says, ‘Look at all this
money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork,’ ”
the former President noted. “That
represents one million, two million, three million jobs.” Graeber
describes this comment as a
“smoking gun” of bullshittization. “Here is the most powerful
man in the world at the time
publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—
and he is insisting that a major
factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of
bullshit jobs,” he writes. Politicians
are so fixated on job creation, he thinks, that no one wonders
which jobs are created, and whether
they are necessary. Unnecessary employment may be one of the
great legacies of recent public-
private collaboration.
By most criteria for market efficiency and workplace happiness,
that is bad. Yet it leads to a
realization that Graeber circles but never articulates, which is
that bullshit employment has come
to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-
baked version of the dole—one

attuned specially to a large, credentialled middle class. Under a
different social model, a young
woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have
collected a government check. Now,
instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care
company, spend half of every
morning compiling useless reports, and use the rest of her desk
time to play computer solitaire or
shop for camping equipment online. It’s not, perhaps, a life
well-lived. But it’s not the terror of
penury, either.
Or maybe she does something even more ambitious. Graeber
claims that it’s “unusual” for
workers to use nonsense jobs as fronts for more rewarding
work. Yet people do write music,
poetry, and more at the bullshit desk. George Saunders
composed the stories in “CivilWarLand
in Bad Decline” while ostensibly doing technical writing for an
engineering company. Jeffrey
Eugenides wrote much of “The Virgin Suicides” during his
employment as a secretary. Those
are good books. The bullshit paychecks that their authors
received were practically

Guggenheims. None of us entirely avoids the bullshit. But a few
people, in the end, make it
work.
• Nathan Heller began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011
and joined the magazine as
a staff writer in 2013.
Read more »
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/george-
saunders-just-wrote-the-best-book-youll-read-this-year.html
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/n_8974/index1.
html

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