Entries by Brian Gallagher

Here Is What Replaces Shareholder Primacy

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.

January 4, 2020 by

The Problem with Hiring Algorithms

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 […]

December 2, 2019 by

Do Traditional Compliance Efforts Weaken Workers’ Moral Motivation?

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 […]

November 27, 2019 by

Can Business Schools Have Ethical Cultures, Too?

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 […]

November 18, 2019 by

A Theranos Whistleblower’s Mission to Make Tech Ethical

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 […]

September 12, 2019 by

Glassdoor Data Is Revealing the Link Between Culture and Good Business

Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden elicited some playful teasing when, early in his presidential campaign, he rather quirkily took to quoting Immanuel Kant, the renowned German philosopher. In various venues, he’d paraphrase what Kant, in one formulation, called his “categorical imperative”—to treat people as ends in themselves, never as a means. On the talk […]

July 31, 2019 by

Does Ideological Diversity Makes Teams More Effective?

As I was watching The Expanse, a science fiction TV series, I realized that the show demonstrates, perhaps without meaning to, the value of ideological diversity within a team. The story follows the small crew of the Rocinante as they stumble into a solar system-wide conspiracy that threatens a fragile peace among a United Nations-led […]

July 31, 2019 by