Ethics & Culture

38 years ago, my dad founded a media buying agency in Chicago. I used to crash the place when I was a kid. On weekends in the early fall before school had started—provided there wasn’t a Northwestern University football game to catch—my brother and I used to go downtown with him for the day. There […]

Full text of the amendment modifying the provisions of Chapter Eight of the U.S. Sentencing Commission Organizational Sentencing Guidelines impacting “effective” compliance programs.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced last week it had appointed William Lenox as ethics counsel. Lenox will head the SEC’s ethics office, where he has worked since 1993. He previously served as a senior trial attorney in the division of enforcement at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. The SEC also announced that Peter Bresnan […]

The week this print edition went to press, Bloomberg had run yet another story drawing a line between business schools and high-profile ethics failures. Focusing on former Enron chief executive Jeff Skilling, who—the reporter went out of her way to mention—had an MBA from Harvard, the article also touched on the higher education and honorary […]

At a lecture on ethics I attended a few years back, the speaker asked the parents in the audience to think honestly about an answer to this question: Would they rather have their kids cheat on a few tests in high school and get into Stanford, or not cheat and get into a lesser school. […]

Last spring, at a conference on Nantucket I co-founded back in 1999, I had the pleasure of running a session on ethics with Harvard Business School research fellow Laura Nash. A noted author and commentator on business ethics, Nash has spent much of the last three decades training senior directors and officers at Fortune 100 […]

Pepper The Ethics Resource Center recently announced that John E. Pepper is the winner of its 2003 Stanley C. Pace Leadership in Ethics Award. Pepper, who served as Proctor & Gamble’s chairman and CEO, retired in 2002 after 38 years with the $43.4 billion household products giant. According to ERC founding chairman Norman Augustine, “There […]

Are investors regaining their trust in Corporate America roughly two years after Enron Corp.’s bankruptcy touched off a wave of corporate scandals? The Bounce-Back One case involved Per-Se Technologies, the provider of outsourcing services we told you about two weeks ago when it announced that an anonymous whistleblower sent a letter to several financial research […]

Ethics policies are only “Step One.” Step Two requires training. But an educated, ethical workforce still won’t prevent senior executives from committing fraud if they’re intent on doing so, nor will it motivate a Board unable (or unwilling) to identify potential problems. It’s surprising, then, that—while most companies have conducted ethics and compliance training for […]

One of the many effects of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is that thousands of public companies are now considering offering their employees an anonymous hotline. This is an important step toward minimizing losses due to fraud. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found in their 2002 Report to the Nation that fraud was detected […]