Ethics

I don’t really know how to talk about business ethics to my team. This is a phrase that many ethics and compliance professionals have heard from front-line supervisors. They are afraid of sounding preachy. Or of not knowing the answers. Or looking soft. If you are one of these supervisors, here’s an easy way to start: Look for a recent...

A family trip to Israel to honor the memory of my father-in-law turned into a war story. News of people displaced from their homes, followed by protests and riots, police blockades, and then missiles fired towards Jerusalem came on the day of the gravesite service. We woke the next morning to warnings of unprecedented civil unrest in neighboring towns. We...

According to several studies, we have over 6,000 thoughts every day. Eighty percent of them are negative, and 95% of them are repetitive. Let that sink in. Ninety-five percent of the thoughts you will have today are thoughts you had yesterday, and the vast majority will be negative. It sheds new light on the expression “How you handle any day...

According to a recent EY report on integrity in emerging markets, many  professionals report that ethical cultures around the world are improving. But respondents also worry that disruptions from COVID-19 and fluctuating markets could erode this progress. COVID-19 variants are surging through emerging markets — and threatening to upend years of progress in the fight against fraud, corruption and cyberattacks....

One’s sense of fairness is influenced by the unfairness one has experienced. As a single child, I thought my parents treated me fairly, since I had no siblings that were treated better. As an able teen in the ’80s, I thought that sidewalks and buildings were well designed, since I had no need for a ramp to access them. As...

Everyone knows to have a rainy day fund. Yet, few people have one, despite the fact that cars break down, roofs leak, and pandemics hit. Today I listened to this story of a businessman and it reminded me of the responsibility businesses have to build rainy day funds. After 22 years in business, this man was unable to pay his business rent the...

NASA announced yesterday that asteroid Apophis will not strike the Earth for at least another 100 years. That’s good news, given that the impact we had feared for 2036 could have killed more than 10 million people. The question is, will we prepare for an eventual impact? The last time we lost tens of millions of humans on the planet, it was 100...

Is there any discipline that keeps you more on your toes than Compliance? It has been gripping to observe the compliance function as it has evolved from administering regulatory risk and compliance to now include serving as the ethical and moral guardians of a company. There are, however, still decisions that sit outside of the Compliance function that have the...

When I was about 10 years old, a neighbor of mine had a picture of an overweight woman on her fridge, cut out from a magazine. She told me it served as a reminder not to overeat. Some 20 years later, I read about a study that found that people who put pictures of lean and strong bodies on their...

I was a senior in high school when the Challenger exploded. I was in class at the time of the launch. I think it was chemistry. The teacher had rolled in a television set for all of us to watch. I remember how quiet the whole school got after the explosion. Not just my classroom; the whole school. Allan McDonald never...

Retaliation against whistleblowers is spiking. Employees and managers are feeling increased pressure across the board. Yet many ethics programs and cultures remain strong. CCI reached Patricia Harned, CEO of ECI, to discuss the latest Global Business Ethics Survey. The Ethics and Compliance Initiative (ECI) has tracked national and global trends in workplace conduct since 1994. It published its 16th iteration...

Using facial recognition technology for tracking employees in the workplace is largely unregulated in the U.S. While the GDPR in the E.U., a few states and industry organizations have provided leadership, experts believe face-scanning will receive attention from lawmakers in the near-term. On a recent weekend morning in January, Christian Godwin walked into the restaurant on the Jersey Shore where...