HBS Working Knowledge Where Morals and Profits Meet: The Corporate Value Shift

"Overall, though, my experience has been that probably half, and maybe even two-thirds, categorize ethics mainly as a risk management issue. These managers tend to see corporate values as a tool for preventing misconduct with its incident legal, financial, and reputational risks. Ethics gets their attention because they want to avoid the high-profile missteps and billion-dollar losses experienced by a Salomon Brothers, Bridgestone/Firestone, or Enron.

In recent years, however, I have seen more attention being paid to the positive side of ethics. More managers are waking up to the ways in which positive values contribute to a company's effective day-to-day functioning, as well as its reputation and long-term sustainability."

redux [09.20.02]
Fast Company The Secret Life of the CEO: Do they even know right from wrong?

"Perhaps we understand now. Or we're starting to. The corporate CEO is not the epic hero we once imagined. Now we know: He was never as smart or as right or as, well, together as we had hoped. His teeth aren't perfect either. But let's not go overboard: He's also not an epic sociopath. CEOs are only as culpable for all that has gone wrong with business in the past year as they were responsible for all that went right in the previous years. Which is to say that whatever they have done or failed to do doesn't explain everything. It doesn't even explain most things.

The truth behind the current episode of corporate comi-tragedy has plenty to do with the men ( and they are mostly men ) who are running the show -- but not in the way that we've always thought. All of our post-Enron hand-wringing about CEOs having values and "walking the talk" isn't wrong, exactly. It's just that it's not exactly right either. The truth is more shaded than that."

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 [07.09.02]
The Washington Post Sleaze and the Slump

"The WorldCom scandal is the latest building block in a new economic mythology. By the old mythology, the Internet and the "new economy" promised a rising stock market and anxiety-free prosperity. The new mythology holds that we've been mugged by corporate greed, which depresses stock prices and devastates "trust." In some ways, this is reassuring. It allows us to believe that purging dishonest executives and enacting the proper reforms will make things right. Unfortunately, it's also false."

"Morality tales are seductive. They express legitimate outrage. They're simple and understandable. It's right vs. wrong. Get rid of the bad guys, and the good guys can win."

"But the very simplicity of morality tales can be misleading."

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.""