a system of moral principles applied in the commercial world. Business ethics provide guidelines for acceptable behavior by organizations in both their strategy formulation and...
Kickback. Carrot. Sweetener. Inducement. Backhander. They're all synonyms for "bribe." Whatever you call it, bribery's just a normal part of doing business in certain corners of the world. China, for example. For all its pre-Olympics tightening-up, business in China is still fueled by bribery. At least that's...
Practice good corporate responsibility and you'll be able to hire fresh-out-of-the-gate MBAs at a deep discount, according to a new study by the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The study showed that 97 per cent of the study's 759 subjects would be willing to sacrifice an...
Business Ethics Begins on Your Hard DriveBusiness Ethics Begins on Your Hard DriveAnswering “no and those who do should not be in the C suite” comes with a bitter pill. I was guilty in the past. Some from my own doing and some from my employer who provided...
Is Wall Street's manage-to-the-numbers approach the reason we're in the economic mess we're in? That's the argument of Gresham's Law and the Shaky Nature of Today's Business Ethics on the Slow Leadership blog. Gresham's Law, it tells us, is a 16th century maxim that 'bad' money (with...
Come on, fess up. Is all of that software on your home computer legal (as in, you purchased it instead of copying the version your foolish friend just bought)? Apparently it's not just you. According to the 2007 State Piracy Study by the Business Software Alliance BSA,...
How can you condemn cheating in a game where the players are expected to "steal" bases? David Jacobson has done a remarkable job in researching and writing this week's business of baseball feature package, talking about salaries, the revenue sharing model and the MLB's legally sanctioned monopoly...
How to Teach Business Ethics, UnethicallyTeaching EthicsThe value of ethics, and moral living generally, has to be instilled in the individual from the outset. If it's not deemed important when growing up, it's easy to dismiss it when grown up, especially in today's relativistic culture where the the main...
If business ethics can be taught - and I have yet to read a convincing argument that they cannot - how should such an important lesson be taught? In business school, perhaps? That would seem to make a whole lot of sense. Business schools seem to be...
Concerned about your workplace's ethics? The ethics of your leadership? You could be in the wrong place, say Ronald Howard and Clinton Korver, authors of "Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life." The book shows how to become...
One of Levi Strauss & Co.'s first great acts of corporate responsibility came just a short while after the company began to supply Comstock Lode miners with tough-skinned work duds in the 1870s. The original Levi's reinforced pants included metal rivets not only on the pockets but also one located...
The Find: Practical, expert guidance on how to stay on the right side of the ethical divide when polishing your resume. The Source: Harvard Business Online's Conversation Starter. The Takeaway: When you're applying for that dream "reach" job the temptation is always there to,...
The great majority of companies can't afford a full-time on-board ethicist to deal with delicate conflicts of interest and other moral dilemmas. Most employees turn to their Human Resources departments. So a study released this month by The Society for Human Resource Management SHRM and The Ethics...
The thing about writing an ethics blog is that I can't tell people what's right and what's wrong. They made up their minds about that long ago. The gray area is that people have their own, very different definitions, of what is wrong. So the best thing I can do...
A year-and-a-half ago, when I was asked to write this ethics blog, I wrote out a short introductory post. So today, my last day writing this blog, I took a quick look at it. Everything you need to survive in today's business world you probably learned in...
Blogs are the Wild West of new media opportunities for doing PR. Unlike old media, run by journalists with decades of experience and set ways of doing things, blogs are in their infancy, and even the ones run or written by former old media journalists are more or less unburdened...
What does it mean to be named to Ethisphere's list of the World's Most Ethical Companies? Well, it's been a week since the list was announced, and those companies who were honored followed through on a topic I discussed in a recent post -- they sold their ethics. They're doing...
Ethics has never been more important in business because people have never been more conscious of the ethics involved in the companies they buy from, invest in, or do business with. From socially-conscious investing, to assessing the environmental impact of goods and services, to the political bent...
Stephen Goldman, a law professor at Catholic University of America, has just come out with a book called "Temptations in the Office: Ethical Choices and Legal Obligations." Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman, has a new book of his own, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White...
The student loan business is going through a credit crisis, and some of the nation's largest lenders are responding with a new business model that may be sound business but is ethically questionable. Students at the top-tier schools are being taken care of, but those at the...
Is it more difficult for businesspeople to adhere to an ethical mind than for those in other professions? That's what a Harvard professor thinks, because he says it lacks the structure of other professions (he makes the point that it is not, strictly, a profession) and the only goal is...
