From the category archives:

Ethics

News Corp Scandal Shows The High Cost of Ethical Folly — Once More

July 18, 2011

The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation. Shakespeare, King Richard II Two universal facts remain unchanged in the News Corporation saga of serial hacking and management misjudgments:  First, a company with a weak ethical culture, no matter how successful financially, will never fully survive the winds of public outrage when it flounders upon [...]

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The Brilliance of Fraudsters -or is it the Dimness of the Guardians?

January 7, 2009

As the fraud at Satyam is dissected, it will reveal red flags that should have been obvious to attentive bodies and a level of complacency on the part of directors, auditors and regulators that should never have occurred. Once again, we are invited to believe that one man has outwitted a huge group of purportedly [...]

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When the Pillars of Invincibility Fall | A Short Essay on Success and its Frequent Impostors

December 12, 2008

General Motors and Nortel look at bankruptcy. The BCE deal dies.  The Bernard Madoff fortune-making machine was a fraud.   The demise of once commanding forces takes its toll and causes us to have many questions about the permanency of success and the always-looming specter of disaster. This week revealed  things no mortal was ever supposed [...]

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Mr. and Mrs. America Ride to Capitalism’s Rescue -Again

July 31, 2008

A brief essay on the subprime credit consequences when CEOs fail to lead, directors fail to direct and regulators fail to regulate It began as a term that few had even heard of barely 18 months ago and most experts dismissed as an insignificant blip in a fundamentally robust economy. But yesterday, George W. Bush [...]

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What Shell is the CEO Bonus Under at Lehman Brothers?

June 25, 2008

It rather neatly illustrates the farce that CEO pay has largely become when Lehman Brothers chief Richard S. Fuld, Jr. announces that he will decline a bonus this year. The board compensation committee has not yet met to determine if one would even be offered to him. But that probably is just a formality because [...]

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Outrage of the Week: When World Morality Goes AWOL over the Burma Tragedy

May 16, 2008

In Burma, where bloated corpses still line the banks of swollen rivers and the cries of orphaned children for food go unheeded, the efforts of the civilized community to bring relief on an organized basis to a cyclone ravaged people continue to be rebuffed by that country’s paranoid military regime. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon [...]

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Note to Wall Street: Nix the Schadenfreude

March 11, 2008

There is an unseemly amount of gloating on Wall Street in the wake of the stunning disclosure yesterday that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was a client of a major prostitution ring. Disgust is called for. Delight is not. What he did as Attorney General to clean up abuses and improprieties in the mutual fund [...]

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Outrage of the Week: When Subprime CEOs Dissemble Before Congress

March 9, 2008

Never in modern business has so much been given to so few for such colossally failed results. In just five years, these three CEOs made more than $460 million while leading their companies into the greatest losses in their history. One of them, Charles O. Prince of Citigroup, even got a bonus of $10 million, [...]

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Conrad Black: Lord of What Might Have Been

March 3, 2008

How strange it is that success can be such an impostor and only a warm-up for the main act of self-inflicted tragedy yet to arrive. When Lord Kylsant of Carmarthen lost all hope of appeal in 1931, the wealthy titan was taken off and spent the next year in London’s bleak Wormwood Scrubs prison. Until [...]

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