Boston.Com In wake of scandals, business schools wonder where to put ethics

"It is hard to shoehorn ethics into a two-year business curriculum with other basic requirements, said David Vogel, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley.

''The curriculum is under so many other pressures to do technology, the Internet, globalization, the environment (ethics) is competing with so many other things,'' Vogel said. ''The curriculum is finite. You can't put everything in it.""

redux [08.06.02]
SiliconValley.Com As valley boomed, pressure blurred ethical boundaries

"Now it's Sunday morning across the nation, and CEOs are being hauled one after the other to the confessional. But the focus on rogue CEOs leaves out a wider picture: Many executives such as Rodek, who consider themselves honest, say they worked in the middle of tremendous pressure to stretch, if not break, the rules.

In an environment where some buffed the numbers, the price of doing the right thing was high and the payoff small. Companies that kept to the straight and narrow risked seeing their all-important share price doomed to mediocrity, making it harder to keep employees, raise money, compete with upstarts or even survive.

``It's not all greed,'' said Rodek, whose Sunnyvale company makes business software. ``Part of it is just competition. Business is a battle you either win or lose. There is no middle.''"

Salon "Buy, Lie and Sell High"

"Stories of scandal and loss -- big and small, international and local -- have filled the business pages ever since. But lost in the shuffle of the headlines made by the likes of Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing was an earlier wave of failures, the once promising online startups that crashed to earth with the bursting of the Internet bubble.

Public attention has been fixated on the sorry images of one CEO and CFO after another making a solemn pilgrimage to Congress to account for the loss of billions of dollars in shareholder equity in huge publicly traded companies. But precious little has been offered to explain the social and economic forces that set the stage for their collapse."

redux [07.24.02]
The Washington Post Stigmatizing Business

"Over the past few weeks, in reaction to a series of corporate scandals, the pendulum of public feeling has swung from celebrating business executives as the architects of economic growth to condemning them as a group of untrustworthy, venal individuals."

"I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. Other honest, hard-working and capable business leaders feel similarly demoralized by a political climate that has declared open season on corporate executives and has let the faults, however egregious, of a few taint the public perception of all. This just at a time when their combined energy and concentration are what's needed to reinvigorate our economy."

Business Week Read Any Good Business Ethics Books?

"Executives seeking counsel on how to restore citizens' trust in Corporate America won't find much help at the local bookstore. A survey of business-book publishers by BusinessWeek Online found few titles in the area of business ethics. Nor does there appear to be any rush to offer new titles that would help managers understand and respond to the crisis of confidence stemming from the collapse of Enron, Arthur Andersen, Global Crossing, and WorldCom."

redux [06.16.02]
SatireWire Remaining U.S. CEOs Make a Break For It

"Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.

"They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenues," said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso. "Right in front of my daughters.""