Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
Alan Yau is a successful entrepreneur. His restaurant, Wagamama, had succeeded beyond his expectations. The restaurant served healthy Japanese dishes adapted to the European taste. The dining environment had onsite-prepared food, quick food preparation, friendly and fast service. Yau set out to build a second location. After the second restaurant opened, financial challenges emerged. Suddenly, a firm made an offer to buy Alan out of the restaurant. This was a hostile buyout. In times like these, founding entrepreneurs experience a struggle. They harbor deep opposition to the idea of being forced to sell a company that they have built into a healthy, profitable entity. These choices Alan faced could be analyzed from the utilitarian and the rights ethical approaches. Would both approaches lead to the same conclusions? Which option should he choose?
Keywords: restaurants, entrepreneurship, hostile takeover, ethics, rights approach
BACKGROUND
Alan Yau was born in Hong Kong into a very poor family. His family was of the Hakka ethnic group, China's wanderers. Yau's father, Yau Cheung Wo, was a tailor who had left for England when Yau was three-years old. Cheong Wo emigrated to improve the financial opportunities for his family. Yau's mother, Ting Fung, followed him three years later, leaving behind their children with their grandparents.
Yau's father was motivated to make it financially in England. The path open to him for fulfilling his dream was the founding of a Chinese restaurant business. Alan was 12 years old when he and his younger brother and sisters joined their parents in King's Lynn, where his father had a Chinese restaurant. Chinese immigrants who went into the restaurant business were willing to make great sacrifices. They lived in small towns to avoid competition and worked long hours for a low wage. At 16, Yau was a server in his father's restaurant - though he had never cooked.
As the eldest of six children, Yau followed the traditional educational path in England. To prepare for a career, he attended the Thames Valley School, North London, where he pursued a degree in business studies. However, he dropped out after two years and switched to London's City University (formerly City Polytechnic) and completed a degree in Politics and Philosophy. After his degree, he returned to...