Ethics & Culture

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 […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission has adopted final rules to implement Section 307 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by setting “standards of professional conduct for attorneys appearing and practicing before the Commission in any way in the representation of issuers.” In addition, the Commission approved an extension of the comment period on the “noisy withdrawal” provisions […]