By Carter McNamara on November 27, 2012
In an earlier life, I taught business ethics. (Most of my undergraduate college credits are in philosophy.) So here’s a very concise overview of the major “school”s of ethics that are often taught in business ethics programs. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative (1700s) Kant asserted that a belief is an ethical principle if, and only if, [...]
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By David Gebler on August 3, 2012
By David Gebler and Donna Boehme In the wake of the Penn State child abuse scandal, many in the media were outraged by the NCAA’s decision to instantly vacate the university’s win record from 1998 through 2011. As two ethicists with a combined 40+ years working in the trenches with organizations and their cultures, we’d [...]
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By David Gebler on May 2, 2012
What’s at the heart of many of today’s scandals? Legal and even innocent behavior that creates a toxic culture. Take the recent GSA scandal for example. As quoted today in Forbes: David Gebler, a whistleblowing expert, lawyer, and author of The 3 Power Values: How Commitment, Integrity, and Transparency Clear the Roadblocks to Performance, says good [...]
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By David Gebler on March 21, 2012
SAIC, a major government technology contractor, just agreed to pay the City of New York $500 million to settle charges of fraud in the development of an employee timekeeping system. Yes, a couple of employees were the real bad apples, engaging in fraud, kickbacks, and money-laundering. But SAIC’s real crime, the actions that cost it [...]
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By David Gebler on March 19, 2012
In their new book, Repeatability, Bain & Co partners Chris Zook and James Allen show that the small percentage of companies that are able to sustain profitability over long periods do so because they are able to control growing complexity which slows them down. These leading companies have repeatable models that allow the company to [...]
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By David Gebler on March 6, 2012
Political scientist James Q. Wilson recently passed away at the age of 80. Wilson and co-author George L. Kelling argued in a landmark 1982 article in The Atlantic that communities must address minor crimes and their effects, such as broken windows, to prevent larger problems from developing. They argued the crime of vandalism wasn’t [...]
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By David Gebler on January 6, 2012
The Ethics Resource Center, a Washington DC based ethics research organization, released its 2011 National Business Ethics Survey. The NBES is regarded as the premier survey of ethics issues in the American workplace. This year’s survey identified some interesting trends: On the one hand, misconduct has reached an historic low and observers of wrongdoing are [...]
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By Carter McNamara on January 2, 2012
Guest post from Jack Hoban. What are Values? According to the dictionary, values are “things that have an intrinsic worth in usefulness or importance to the possessor,” or “principles, standards, or qualities considered worthwhile or desirable.” However, it is important to note that, although we may tend to think of a value as something good, [...]
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By David Gebler on July 18, 2011
At some point in a scandal companies can longer gloss over the trouble with settlements and promises of reform. Curious as to whether News Corp has crossed that line. From today’s New York Times: As Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler, said after Ms. Brooks resigned, “This is [...]
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By David Gebler on July 5, 2011
The Wall St. Journal reported today that Western companies including Cisco Systems Inc. have been contracted to build an ambitious new surveillance project in China —a citywide network of as many as 500,000 cameras that officials say will prevent crime but that human- rights advocates warn could target political dissent. Should companies be responsible for how [...]
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David Gebler with Skout Group is a recognized thought leader in values-based ethics and culture risk management, and is an innovator of new approaches to help companies align behavior with ethical and strategic values.