A good friend of EthicScan Donna Boehme has wriiten a review of the program.As she notes”Now that the SEC has logged at least seven full months of the Dodd Frank whistleblower program, it’s worth taking a moment for a brief status check on what we have learned so far. To do that we might consider two available clues: a public comment from an SEC official and the fate of a GE whistleblower who is suing the company for retaliation.”To see Donna’s views on the general status of whistleblowing and the emerging issues I would suggest you read about that further here.

“The penalties handed out by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to the coaches and executives of the New Orleans Saints organization for the bounty program practiced down on the bayou were perhaps the stiffest in the history of the game.If only those on Wall Street and in Washington overseeing our financial markets had the same principles.”From a posting by Larry Doyle.

As Bradley J. Ruffle an associate professor of economics at Ben-Gurion University in Israel writes on the HBR Business Blog”You’d certainly stand out from the crowd, and with personal boundaries getting fuzzier and everyone’s pictures on Facebook anyway, what’s the harm of showing an employer what you look like?
The truth is, you could be hurting your chances as well as contributing to a bigger problem: allowing bias to creep into companies’ hiring processes.”

“This text draws on the expertise of many of Canada’s leading scholars of business ethics to provide lively and accessible coverage of the issues. Geared specifically to introductory Business Ethics courses, it offers an overview of basic concepts and key debates. Numerous case studies are featured throughout, along with thoughtful analysis of the issues by contributors.”

Download the PDF. What makes even good people cross ethical boundaries? Society demands that business and professional schools address ethics, but the results have been disappointing. This paper argues that a behavioral approach to ethics is essential because it leads to understanding and explaining moral and immoral behavior in systematic ways.

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.”

“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

In this article we understand an approach to business ethics from the tradition of Islam “Ethics is defined as the set of moral principles that distinguish what is right from what is wrong. Islam places the highest emphasis on ethical values in all aspects of human life. Business ethics, simply limits its frame of reference to organisations engaged in commerce using set of principles time being in vogue. The term is more closely related to Quranic term khuluq. Islam demands its believers to observe certain norms and moral codes in their all spheres of private and public life.”

We are reproducing his full post here as the issues he raises are succinctly defined best in his own words.”
” Listen in on MBA classes and corporate conferences and you will hear a lot of talk about the need for inspiring missions, ethical behavior and transcendent purpose. And judging from the “core values” statements in most annual reports, the vast majority of business leaders want their companies to grow by enriching the lives of their customers and employees.

And yet, this can often sound like so much fluff in the real business world. Our system of financial accounting rewards quarterly profits, but struggles mightily to place a value on ethical behavior. Even accounting rules specifically dealing with reputation — goodwill and intangible assets — are subject to frequent rule changes and endless debate.

Perhaps the accountants are just overcomplicating a basic idea. Reputation is earned through the simple, age-old concept of the Golden Rule: treat others as you yourself would want to be treated. Each time you live up to the Golden Rule, your reputation is enhanced; each time you fail, it is diminished. And the mathematics of long-term financial success — revenues, profits, cash flow — square perfectly with this scorecard.

We all want to be treated with honor and respect in ways, large and small, that enrich our lives. Such experiences not only make us happy, we want to share them with people we care about. By recommending an experience, we’re signaling our trust that our friends will be treated similarly. Recommendations also signal to businesses how customers view their relationship with the company. When customers feel so well treated that they enthusiastically recommend a company to friends, they are promoters. When treated so badly they recommend avoiding the company, they are detractors. Both have direct and measurable economic consequences.

This is the concept at the heart of the Net Promoter system, which my colleague Rob Markey and I describe in our book, published last month. The Net Promoter system focuses the entire organization on generating promoters, who buy more, stay longer, refer friends and even provide useful feedback and ideas. It also helps minimize the number of costly detractors. A recent research project we conducted found that across multiple industries, the company with the leading Net Promoter score typically grew more than twice as fast as their competitors.

That should keep the accountants happy. But for companies, executives and employees, there’s also an inspirational dimension: the system provides them with a practical way to measure how consistently they treat people right. You might call it the Golden Ruler.

That’s how Walt Bettinger, chief executive of Charles Schwab, describes his company’s Net Promoter system when recommending it to other CEOs:

“First, I ask them if they believe in the importance of the Golden Rule — that ancient moral and ethical principle that we should treat people the way we would want to be treated. They always nod emphatically and say, ‘Yes, of course.’ So then I ask them what they do to measure how consistently they and their organization are living the Golden Rule each day. Their typical response: ‘Well, it would be great if we could measure it, but there’s no practical way to do that.’ To which I reply that there most certainly is a way. In fact, at Schwab, we have been using the Net Promoter System to measure our Golden Rule compliance for more than five years, and it works brilliantly. Net Promoter is the first screen I open when I boot up my computer each morning. It lets me know for each part of our company how we are performing in living up to our core values. By making NPS a top priority, we have become a better company — not just in terms of living our core values, but also in terms of profitable growth.”

Bettinger is not alone. CEO Dan Cathy explains the winning strategy at Chick-fil-A in similar terms: “We strive to deliver something for which there is unlimited demand–being treated with honor and respect. There seems to be a very limited supply of that in today’s world.”

These CEOs have not discovered a new concept: in one form or another, the Golden Rule is a pillar of most of the world’s great religions and it also lies at the heart of secular ethics. Business ethicists Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria describe the Golden Rule as an expression of the basic human instinct to bond with others.

The challenge executives face is how to put the Golden Rule into practice, especially when the lingua franca of financial accounting pushes the business to focus on short-term profits. “[M]orals are such a central and pervasive aspect of human life that we badly need a scientific way of understanding them,” Lawrence and Nohria write.

As CEOs Bettinger and Cathy have discovered, a Net Promoter system provides one framework to do that. When properly installed and operated, it delivers financial growth. But it also shows that those MBA class discussions and annual report rhetoric aren’t just fluff. If you build a way to measure it, you’ll find that it really does pay to be good.”

From the Ethics Resource Center

The focus of this article is on values, the sticky issue of ethics, and the responsibility business leaders have to “do the right thing.”

Continuing with our exploration of religious approaches to business ethics ,this article examines the relevance and value of Confucian Ethics to contemporary Business Ethics by comparing their respective perspectives and approaches towards business activities within the modern capitalist framework, the principle of reciprocity and the concept of human virtues.

The title of this article by Roger Martin the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada speaks for itself.Or…Does it?
Any views?

Continuing our exploration of how the great faith traditions approach business ethics we invite Stephen J. Gould into the conversation.As he notes “while Buddhism focuses on the same ethical concerns as Western ethical traditions, it provides a distinct perspective and method for dealing with them” His paper outlines the basic Buddhist perspective and then provides some experiential exercises which offer insight for self-understanding and ethical practices in business.He also discusses the implications for business and ethics research.

This is the third in a series of postings inquiring how the great faith traditions approach business ethics, The essential message found in the classic Jewish discussions of business ethics is to go about your business by always being mindful that good faith business is no small task.It requires the creation of a level economic playing-field. It assumes that the weak need to be protected from exploitation… but the powerful sometimes need protection as well. Two videos show the how it is put into practice .Watch the video here on Money and Morals

This is a second in a series of postings looking at business ethics from a religious perspective.In this article we view business ethics through the lens of Islam.We learn that Islam approaches business ethics from a variety of perspectives including trustworthiness,truthfulness,and the honoring of obligations.

I would like to start a discussion about how the world’s great faith traditions approach the ethics of
business.This is the first of these posts.A place to begin is with the Journal of Religion and Business Ethics, a peer-reviewed journal that examines the ethical and religious issues that arise in the modern business setting.” While much attention has been given to the philosophical treatment of business ethics, this is the first journal to address the more inclusive scope of religious ethics and their understanding of right and just economic relationships.” Another place to begin our exploration is with this summary of the approaches of the major faith traditions

Here is Chris in his own words and some of his thoughts on being named.

”The focus on “trust” in this listing is interesting. There’s probably not much to differentiate this list from a listing of thought-leaders in, say, business ethics or CSR. That’s not to say that a different title wouldn’t have changed the list at all; but basically all such lists, whether they’re of companies or of individuals, are about the doing the right thing in business or about promoting and fostering such behaviour.

But I do like the focus on trust. I think the role of trust in commerce simply cannot be overstated. Business — and that includes consumers interacting with any business — simply cannot happen without trust. Consider, for example, how crucial trust is…

* …whenever you buy any consumer product, and thereby trust not just the person who sold it to you, but dozens or perhaps even hundreds of people who helped make that product.
* …whenever one business buys something from another business, just by picking up the phone and saying, “Hey, please send us a box of X, and we’ll pay you at the end of the month.”
* …whenever anyone is employed by anyone else. (In that case, the employer trusts the employee not to shirk as soon as the employer’s back is turned, and the employee trusts the employer to pay the agreed-upon amount at the end of the day or week or whatever.)
* …whenever you give some of your money to a bank, ask them to hold onto it for you, and then (as most of us do) take their word for it when they tell you how much interest you’ve earned (or, more likely, how much interest you owe them on the money you’ve borrowed).
* …whenever you climb into a taxi, or sit down at a restaurant to eat. (The driver or waiter is trusting that you will actually pay your bill at the end, rather than make a dash for it.)
* …whenever you pick up the phone to order pizza. (The fact that it actually shows up means that they trust you to pay for it when it gets there.)

Basically, all of us, in our organizational lives and in our lives as consumers, end up trusting dozens and perhaps hundreds of people (and many many business organizations, too) during the course of our daily lives.

Of course, sometimes we use specific mechanisms to enforce trustworthiness — policies, laws, regulations, warrantees, contracts, etc. But all the formal enforcement mechanisms in the world couldn’t possibly keep a complex modern economy running, in the absence of a fundamental ethical commitment to trustworthy behaviour.”