Bank Culture Reform & Behavioral Science Event April 9

Ethical Systems is partnering with Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services, Regulatory Intelligence, and Starling to put on a panel event on Bank Culture Reform & Behavioral Science.

 

Location:

Thomson Reuters 
3 Times Square
30th Floor
New York, NY 10036

 

Date and Time:

Monday, April 9th
8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET

Jon Haidt Presents Keynote on “Maintaining Ethical Culture” at Global Ethics Summit 2018

In today's polarized political climate, it is even more important to know how to engage in constructive dialogue in order to advance mutual business interests and perpetuate a sustainable organizational culture of ethics and respect.

Addressing this head on, Ethical Systems co-founder Jonathan Haidt delivered a mid-day keynote entitled Maintaining Ethical Culture in a Political Whirlwind on day 1 at Ethisphere's Global Ethics Summit 2018.

Featured Expert Mira Dewji, Attorney, Adjunct Professor and Strategic Advisor

Featured Expert Mira Dewji, Attorney, Adjunct Professor and Strategic Advisor


What are your current areas of work and instruction?

I’m a practicing attorney in the social impact sector and an Adjunct Professor in the Business and Society Program at NYU’s Stern School of Business. I provide legal and strategic advice to high-impact social enterprises, small businesses, foundations, and nonprofits whose means and ends align with my values. I see the law as a tool with which I can craft, protect and facilitate my clients’ social objectives. Perhaps because my clients are organizations and not individuals, my interest in business ethics is at the organizational level. When social impact is framed as ethics, it adopts a powerful lexicon. A business or industry’s responsibility becomes more than merely a conversation around compliance with law or private sector benevolence. Social impact encompasses the duties and relationship between an organization and the environment that facilitates its existence. 

From this perspective, it is not sufficient for an organization to maintain certain ethical practices with key stakeholders such as employees, customers, and partners. Designing systems that define and foster company values such as honesty, integrity, transparency, accountability, trust, and ethical leadership are essential. But organizations also participate in shaping societal values and outcomes, and the extent to which a company embraces that responsibility is a reflection of its ethics.

NY Fed Offers New Insights for Financial Services Firms

There are two new resources on the Governance and Culture Reform site of the Federal Reserve Bank of NY that highlight the regulatory trends with respect to managing culture in financial services firms. 

The first is a transcript from an event at Thomson Reuters on February 7, 2018, which was a moderated discussion among Bill Dudley (President of the NY Fed), Bill Rhodes (WR Rhodes Global Advisors), and Ellen Alemany  (Chairwoman and CEO of CIT Group), moderated by Rob Cox (Reuters News).  The panelists covered a wide array of matters relating to the topic of Banking Culture:  Still room for reform?

Dudley highlighted that while some progress has been made, there’s still much room for improvement.  For example, the NY Fed has proposed a banking registry to keep track of whether employees have left their jobs for reasons of fraud or other misconduct.  This would address the so called “rolling bad apples” problem, whereby companies may inadvertently hire a rogue employee of another firm because employment law discourages employers from sharing potentially derogatory information about former employees.  He mentions that the U.K. has perhaps made more progress on this matter, having already established a similar registry.

Featured Expert Pat Harned, CEO of the Ethics and Compliance Initiative

Featured Business Ethics and Leadership Expert Pat Harned, CEO of the Ethics and Compliance Initiative

 

For many years, ECI has been a leader in providing research, resources and communities of practice for business ethics leaders. What do you see on the horizon for the organization as it helps companies elevate their E&C programs?

It has been an honor for us to be able to work alongside some of the finest practitioners who are dedicated to establishing and maintaining a high standard of integrity in their organizations.  We intend to continue providing these practitioners new insights from research, and new benchmarks on the drivers of ethical cultures.  We will also be launching even more ways for professionals to exchange ideas and to advance best practice.  ECI is also working with a group of practitioners to develop a maturity model of E&C programs, based on our recent Blue Ribbon Panel report on High Quality Ethics & Compliance Programs. Our expectation is that this new resource will help companies to further assess and improve their programs.  

Under Pressure: Wells Fargo, Misconduct, Leadership and Culture

Consistent with our mission to bring timely and relevant research to the business ethics community, Ethical Systems has just published a new electronic resource: Under Pressure: Wells Fargo, Misconduct, Leadership and Culture [updated May 2018 to include a new Executive Summary and further details about the case]

This case study, created by Bharathy Premachandra, our 2017 Bryan Turner Intern in Business Ethics, with Azish Filabi, Executive Director of Ethical Systems, spotlights the lessons learned from the recent scandal at Wells Fargo around false accounts, inflated sales targets and misguided directives from bank executives.

New Behavioral Science One Sheet: Goals Gone Wild

Ethical Systems has released our newest Behavioral Science One Sheet, created in partnership with the Notre Dame Center for Ethical Leadership.

Our Winter 2017 one sheet on Goals Gone Wild encompasses the concept of goal setting and how doing so can inadvertently lead to unethical behavior in organizations. We credit Professor Lisa Ordóñez of the Eller School of Management for her work helping both introduce the topic to the academic field and her work crafting the text on this informative one sheet. 

Prioritizing Social Responsibility in Companies: A coming firestorm?

In a development that Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times believes will cause “a firestorm” in boardrooms across the country, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock has sent a letter to the chief executives of the world’s largest public companies urging them to prioritize their company’s social responsibilities.

Sorkin writes that this is likely to be a watershed moment for American companies, given BlackRock’s position as one of the largest investors in the world with more than $6 trillion under management through 401(k) plans, exchange-traded funds and mutual funds.

Whistleblower: Companies Need to Encourage Speak-Up Culture

Maria Lemos Stein recently interviewed noted consultant Wendy Addison, Founder and Chief Executive of SpeakUp SpeakOut, in The Wall Street Journal. Addison is also known for her personal role as a whistleblower on fraud and corruption in 2000 regarding LeisureNet Ltd., whose joint chief executives were convicted of fraud in one of the biggest corporate scandals in South Africa

Addison promotes a speak up culture as the method by which companies develop an environment where problems are acknowledged and solved transparently, and before a problem becomes widespread. That way, she asserts, companies avoid the fines, reputation loss, and other negatives associated with more public scandal. Further, the person or group reporting the issue does not face internal retribution because speaking up is encouraged at all levels of the organization.

Caterina Bulgarella Dispels the False Meme that Culture Is Intangible

Featured Interview: Caterina Bulgarella PhD, Culture Architect and Ethics Expert

    
What are your current areas of work and research?

Both my work and research focus on organizational culture. Over time, this work has become one and the same with building ethics in organizations, consistent with the evolution companies have been going through over the past 10-15 years. Ethical behavior underlines a powerful cocktail of ingredients (e.g., self-regulation, moral awareness, ability to ‘self-organize’ in the face of missing information, etc.). These human qualities and behaviors are also what organizations need to master the unprecedented level of complexity and change they face today.