Cultural Alignment and Compliance

Mary Schapiro, former SEC Chairman from January 2009 until December 2012, remembers "a time when enforcement fines were the cost of doing business." But in August 2013, WSJ financial editor Francesco Guerrera wrote of a change in the regulatory…

Blind Spots Review by Jeff Kaplan

Although we plan to add a full-length book summary in the near future, lawyer and ethical systems researcher Jeff Kaplan has already written a review of Blind Spots (homepage, amazon, B&N, public library), by Max Bazerman…

Week That Was in Ethical Systems, 9/16-9/22

Cheating and Culture: “Students Accused of Cheating Return Awkwardly to a Changed Harvard” in the New York Times Ethical breaches send ripples through all organizations. A year after dozens of students were caught cheating, students and…

The Ethics of Pay for Performance

The Trouble with Wall Street, by Michael Lewis. The New Republic, February 4, 2013. Earlier this year, Michael Lewis addressed how firms on Wall Street in general, and Goldman Sachs in particular, have fostered a culture that systematically…

Ethics Classes Don’t Need to Make Students More Ethical To Be Worthwhile

Business Ethics is often criticized on the grounds that its inclusion in the business education curriculum has not improved the ethical performance of business. This critique is grounded in two false assumptions: (1) individual and institutional…

Regulation is especially needed in the finance industry

Two interesting recent articles, from left and right, argue that the finance industry is especially in need of restraint imposed by government regulation. From the left, Paul Krugman, "Why We Regulate."  Gilded age banks, with little…