The title says it all. A very insightful article by Jim Noertz who is a compliance director at Bausch and Lomb, and has global responsibility for developing, evaluating and supporting the company’s compliance and ethics programs.
Archive for January, 2012
Compassion, Forgiveness, Gratitude Are Keys To Winning Business Race
January 30th, 2012 by admin | 2 Comments | Filed in Ethical Development, Leadership, Organizational EthicsSticking to values activates ‘ethics’ part of brain
January 27th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Ethical DevelopmentPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
Washington, OLR, Sticking to values even in the face of temptations, including money, activates an area of the brain tied with rules-based, ethical thought processes. Simply told, decision-making over ‘sacred values’ prompts our brains to act in a specific way, says an Emory University neuro-imaging study.
”Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Centre for Neuropolicy at Emory University who led the study, the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society reports.
Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain responses of a group of adults during key phases of an experiment, according to an Emory statement.
Participants could earn as much as $100 per statement by simply agreeing to sign a document stating the opposite of what they believed. They could choose to opt out of the auction for statements they valued highly.
The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural (brain cells) systems linked with evaluating rights and wrongs (left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems tied with reward.
Participants who reported more active affiliations with organisations, namely churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values.
כל־האדם Hebrew Bible Ethics and the Book of Ruth
January 27th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Moral Philosophy“Posted in Ethics, Ruth by Joseph Kelly on January 26, 2012
The major scholarly works belonging to the “Old Testament Ethics” genre tend to create ethical constructs or systematic proposals for reading the Hebrew Bible with the goal being contemporary application. These constructs/proposals necessarily impose their modern aims and assumptions on the text, for better or for worse. These works are properly classified as prescriptive in nature”. More here.
More here
The Economics of Corruption
January 27th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Corruption“The study of corruption has one glaring problem: the difficulty obtaining data upon which to base conclusions. Shawn A. Cole and Anh Tran add to the research literature of corruption by analyzing actual internal records of firms that paid bribes in an Asian developing country. The work, they report, provides “new estimates of corruption and study its relationship with organizational ownership.” Their book chapter, “Evidence from the Firm: A New Approach to Understanding Corruption”, will be included in the forthcoming second volume of International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption.”
Reuters Investigates Ethics in economics? Who cares?
January 25th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Business Ethics, Organizational EthicsBack in December, a Reuters investigation examined the ties between economists who testify to Congress on financial regulation and big financial institutions.
A Reuters review of 96 testimonies given by 82 academics to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee between late 2008 and early 2010 — as lawmakers debated the biggest overhaul of financial regulation since the 1930s — found no clear standard for disclosure.
In fact, roughly a third did not reveal their financial affiliations in their testimonies, based on a comparison of the text of their testimonies available on the Congressional committees’ websites with their resumes available online.
Top Risks and Ethical Decisions 2012 with Ian Bremmer
January 17th, 2012 by admin | 2 Comments | Filed in Democracy“What are the biggest political risks in 2012, and the associated ethical decisions? Political risk guru Ian Bremmer discusses his annual list, and his conclusions may surprise you.”
“Stress” Taking a Heavy Toll on Compliance and Ethics Professionals
January 14th, 2012 by admin | 2 Comments | Filed in Business Ethics, Organizational Ethics, Trust“On-the-job stress leading to sleepless nights and thoughts of quitting work
MINNEAPOLIS, Jan. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — At a time when the public’s attention is focused on the need for greater corporate integrity, the majority of compliance and ethics professionals report that they often wake during the middle of the night with job-related worries and they have considered quitting their jobs due to the stress. This disturbing data was revealed in a recent survey conducted in October and November of 2011 by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association.
Overall, 58% of survey respondents reported that they often wake up during the middle of the night worrying about job-related stress and 60% report having considered leaving their job in the last 12 months due to job-related stress.
Compliance and ethics professionals also report that keeping up with new and changing laws and regulations, preventing compliance and ethics violations, and remediating compliance and ethics violations are the greatest contributors to on-the-job stress.
“Six out of ten people waking up in the middle of the night from job related stress is unacceptable for any profession. The Compliance profession’s purpose is to prevent and detect the problems that have occurred in organizations such as Enron, Tyco, and Penn State University. There are reasons those who came before the Compliance profession stopped short of fixing these problems. Fixing these problems is very difficult and stressful. SCCE and HCCA will work to help their 10,000 members deal with this stress. We have dedicated a day and a half strategic planning session in January 2011 to this issue and this issue alone. However, we can only do so much. Compliance professionals, who are asked to do this difficult job, need support from leadership, reasonable authority, and independence. If society wants to us deal with these issues—so difficult that others have chosen to look the other way—then society should make an effort to support this profession,” said SCCE and HCCA Chief Executive Officer Roy Snell.
Most compliance and ethics professionals report that adversarial relationships with their colleagues, adds to job-related stress. Fifty-eight percent of respondents felt they are in an adversarial situation or isolated from colleagues in other departments. Compliance and ethics professionals positively rated their relationship with the legal department; 54% gave it a “5″ rating while another 26% gave it a “4″ rating. However, the relationship with the sales, marketing, and manufacturing departments was clearly the poorest with 14% rating it a “5″ and only 24% rating it a “4″.”
Survey Forecasts ‘Looming Ethics Downturn’ in Corporate America
January 7th, 2012 by admin | 2 Comments | Filed in Business Ethics
As Business Ethics magazine notes”Those are the primary conclusions of the seventh National Business Ethics Survey (NBES) conducted by the Ethics Resource Center, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization. The bi-annual report is based on telephone and web responses from 4,683 employees of for-profit organizations during September 2011.”
Why CSR’s Future Matters to Your Company
January 7th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in CSRSusan McPherson on a blog in the Harvard business review writes“More and more, companies are building long-term commitments to corporate social responsibility. In 2012 the rise in consumer activism and mobility, the Occupy movement, 24-hour accountability (thanks to social media), and global resource depletion will force every enterprise, large and small, to make CSR a focal point…”
Knowledge@Wharton Business Ethics Research Article Business vs. Ethics: The India Tradeoff?
January 3rd, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Business Ethics“As Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, observed, “If you choose not to participate in [corruption], you leave behind a fair amount of business.”
Much has been written about the benefits of doing business in India — low input costs, easy access to labor and a massive consumer base. Less has been said about the ability of companies in India to thrive by bending rules, greasing palms and broadening ethical boundaries. At a time when the issue of corruption threatens the stability of the Indian government and scandals unearthed in sectors from sports to telecommunications total tens of billions of dollars, it is becoming increasingly critical for multinational managers to ask whether business
