Brian Scott Gallagher is the Communications Director at Ethical Systems.
Over the years I’ve found it common, interviewing people, to hear that their line of work wasn’t what they envisioned for themselves. A game theorist I spoke to not too long ago, for example, had originally planned to study spacetime but now he models cooperation. Recently, I was curious about the sort of response I’d […]
It started with a trail of car owners bringing their Fords to repair shops. Eventually, it escalated to an out-of-control hemorrhaging of warranty costs and legal bills. Now Ford faces a federal criminal fraud probe into its conduct. Did the company know that the DPS6 dual-clutch “PowerShift” transmission it installed in its Focus and Fiesta cars […]
One day, about a decade ago, an evolutionary biologist from Binghamton, New York, made a decision: He’d use his knowledge of humanity’s social nature to try to understand and improve its social life, especially in his hometown.
In 2004, when a “webcam” was relatively unheard-of tech, Mark Newman knew that it would be the future of hiring. One of the first things the 20-year old did, after getting his degree in international business, was to co-found HireVue, a company offering a digital interviewing platform. Business trickled in. While Newman lived at his […]
How can organizations actualize their employees’ ethical potential? It’s a question Carsten Tams has been tossing around recently. In his time helping companies with organizational design and cultural change, among other things, he’s come to believe that, in the right environment, people are quite capable, even eager, to conform with and uphold ethical norms. Behavioral […]
Early in Managing Business Ethics: Straight Talk About How to Do It Right, I had to wonder whether an anecdote the authors share was apocryphal. It comes in a section of the book’s seventh edition (published in 2017) called “Moving Beyond Cynicism.” It’s not that the authors, Linda Treviño and Katherine Nelson, both professors of […]
Update: The video of our discussion with David Sloan Wilson, Erika Cheung, and Toby Shannon is now available for viewing! Watch it here or below. On a trip to Ottawa, a few years ago, I got to tour the offices of the e-commerce company Shopify, courtesy of a friend of mine I was visiting who […]
Several times in conversation people have asked me whether I mean Thanos, the Marvel villain, when I bring up Theranos. “No,” I say, “I mean Theranos, the tech company once valued at $9 billion before it imploded due to scandal—haven’t you seen the ads for the HBO documentary? They’re everywhere.” I add that Theranos of […]
Well into his 30s, my father ran a pool-plumbing business that just got us by: Sometimes clients wouldn’t pay, and when they did, it wouldn’t be uncommon for checks to bounce. His workers would demand higher wages while he would often have to fix poor work on-site, which would cut into his budget and time. […]
Charles Darwin ended The Origin of Species, his argument for evolution by natural selection, on a note of celebrated eloquence. “There is grandeur to this view of life,” he wrote, “with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according […]
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