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Then there is the for-profit college that mislead investors and was found guilty of fraud. The college had to pay back investors $32 million dollars.  They managed to put a non-ethical spin on the bad financial news by "reporting a 32 million quarterly loss triggered by a class action defeat." See Business, page 1, Arizona Republic 29 Mar 2008. 

Wait a minute, shouldn't they have said the quarterly loss was due to "the court found we were defrauding people who invested money with us"? Was it unethical to not tell investors in their for-profit company that the company officers were found guilty of fraud and were still running the company?

Shame!. Blaming lawyers for class actions and implying an unjust lawsuit instead of accepting responsibility for unethical conduct seems to be popular, even among the educators teaching future corporate executives.

Company Culture: A Self-Assessment Instrument.
By Stewart Levine

Culture is a function of the quality and character of the web of relationships in the organization, and, in many ways the relationships are the organization.....[We developed a tool to recognize the company culture]

Regulate and read employees' email on company computers? The job for the company has to include getting employees and management to discuss the value assumptions used by both sides, and to get employees and management to recognize and respect the value assumptions of the other side.

REPUTATION, RELATIONSHIPS,
AND RISK
By Mark Rowe

[Ed. Comment: Rowe is a Senior Research Associate at the esteemed Center for Business Ethics, Bentley College , Waltham, MA.  He has written a number of research articles on the subject of business ethics.  This is an insight of his that matches our own thought on Neoethics.]

Over the past few years, I have had many conversations with ethics and compliance professionals about what is now commonly called corporate social responsibility (CSR). Frequently these conversations have involved hacking through a dense thicket of related terms and definitions that have sprouted over the last decade. Terms like corporate responsibility, sustainability . . . they all point in the same direction: throughout the industrialized world, and in many developing countries there has been a sharp escalation in the social roles corporations are expected to play and in the number of stakeholder groups to whom they are expected to be accountable, in addition to shareholders. . . a number of factors are bringing the fields of CSR and business ethics closer together.

in Ethics Matters.

If you want a copy of Audit Committee Checklist and Compliance Timeline, by Gregory J. Conklin and John F. Olson (Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP), a comprehensive outline on "the more active role than ever" that audit committees play "in monitoring the integrity of company financial statements, overseeing a company's relationship with and monitoring the independence of its outside auditor, and monitoring the company's internal controls and compliance with legal and regulatory requirements." --- then contact us.  We'll see you get one. You'll find much in that checklist on general audit committee member qualifications, including discussions of the level of financial expertise the committee must possess and on the specific responsibilities each member must discharge.

Now, more than ever, proactive companies should be seeking outside consultants to aggressively work to create an ethics culture that promotes the company values and at the same time protects the company.  Why?  Because in this year of 2006, in Burlington Northern v. Santa Fe Railroad Co. v. White, the United States Supreme Court gave courts a new and employee-friendly standard to determine when conduct in response to an employee’s discrimination claim is actionable.

Now, to prove retaliation and thus recover damages, the employee only needs to prove a "materially adverse action" that would dissuade a reasonable employee from bringing a discrimination claim. Leading up to Burlington Northern, some Circuits had held that only final employment decisions, including termination and failure to hire or failure to promote, rose to the level of retaliatory conduct.  Now an atmosphere of distrust when an employee is moved to less desirable work may be the beginning of an employee charging retaliation, and other employees willing to sign on as plaintiff witnesses. The Burlington case makes an ethics culture of trust more important. 

What happens if a customer asks one of your low level management for a favor that is not illegal, but you wouldn't want your family to know about?  Is your corporation prepared to prevent it?

Ethical Culture: the five questions executives should answer.

Ethical culture is critical to corporate governance, yet corporate executives still lack a common understanding of the term and its implications, as well as how ethical culture develops in an organization. Consequently, in every seminar addressed to executives, the executives should leave understanding the answer to five questions.  That understanding is what will make them outstanding executives.  The questions are:

• What is a corporate "ethical culture"?

• What is the impact of ethical culture on our business?

• How does ethical culture form?

• What are the implications for leadership?

• What should the executive team do in the near future to make our company outstanding?

Computer snooping. When an employee with key knowledge about your business leaves --- are you worried about theft of your company's information? And what is the business ethics of what you may be doing in snooping in the "employee's" computer. All right, we know ....

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