Tag Archive for ‘Ethics’
Adding Value and Values to the MBA
When students return to campus in coming weeks, so will debate about the purpose of management education and the role of ethics. Columnist Gael O’Brien wonders whether current business leaders will support training new leaders in skills and competencies that support new models of business – or will it be simply business as usual?
Verbatim: How Businesses View Sustainability & CSR Reporting
Investment firm Walden Asset Management recently researched and compiled quotes from sustainability and corporate responsibility reports by several dozen companies in a wide range of industries. The exercise showed, says a Walden executive, that attention to such issues has become vitally important for a company’s business, and that transparent reporting is, as one CEO said, one of “the prices of doing business today.”
Would You Want to Do Business With This Man?
Ventureneer CEO Geri Stengel says she judges people by the way they behave, with her and with others. Which makes her think that, despite the lofty environmental goals of a new start-up company in the dry cleaning industry, she won’t be doing business with that company any time soon.
Fried Chicken, Krispy Kreme and Lobbying
Last December, a $500 donation could buy a ticket to a fundraiser that, the invitation said, would feature “Bojangles’ Fried Chicken, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, And Mel Watt, of course!” Two days later, Watt, a Democratic congressman from North Carolina, withdrew a provision from the House’s financial reform bill that would have regulated loans from car dealers.
Opinion: BP puts costs ahead of environment. Are we surprised?
BP’s failure to stop the worst oil spill in U.S. history is indicative of a much larger problem with companies that have embraced one of the central ideas in management today: stakeholder theory. The idea that companies can meet the needs of “stakeholders” leaves them open to moral abuse without normative principles at its core.
The Ethical Risk of Business as Usual
Columnist Gael O’Brien wonders what it will take to convince corporate leaders to build into their risk management strategies the capacity to ask crucial questions about ethical liability, as is done with legal liability. Such a step, she says, would be hardly radical and would have the objective of putting ethical conduct on the table as a deliberate outcome.
Bank of America to Pay $108 Million to Settle Countrywide Case
The Federal Trade Commission said that when homeowners fell behind on payments and were in default on loans, Countrywide ordered property inspections, lawn mowing, and other services meant to protect the lender’s interest in the property. But rather than hire third-party vendors to perform the services, Countrywide created subsidiaries to hire the vendors, often marking up prices charged by 100 percent or more.
Diebold to Pay $25 Million to Settle Accounting Fraud Charges
The maker of ATMs, bank security systems and voting machines was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with manipulating earnings over a five-year period, misstating the company’s reported pre-tax earnings by at least $127 million.
Proxy Advisors Find Themselves in the Spotlight
Proxy advisory services play a key role because institutional holders turn to them for advice when voting billions of shares at annual meetings. Questions are now being raised about the influence of the services and whether more formal oversight is needed. As a result, proxy advisory services may be about to start receiving their own report cards for a change.
Ethics Specialist Named Dean of Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School professor Nitin Nohria has been a faculty leader of the movement to adopt an MBA Oath, a voluntary pledge for graduating and current MBAs to “create value responsibly and ethically.”
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