I am watching the situation in Ukraine unfold in horror. Many times I find myself in tears, watching people clutching their few belongings and leaving their home by any means possible, including walking across the borders to neighboring countries. I am astounded by the generosity and kindness of those neighbors and of people all around the world doing what they can to support the Ukrainians. To be fair, I also feel badly for the Russian people, whom I believe do not have accurate information about the war and who do not want this war but are tortured if they speak out against it. In part my heart aches because this was my family’s story many, many years ago. My mom →
Category: Ethics in the News
This is a tale of a leader amassing too much power in an organization and the ethical consequences that shattered people, organization, and the public trust, just to “please the boss”. Ah, you thought I was finally going to enter the political arena, right? Sorry to disappoint. On the few occasions where I did write or discuss something political I got nasty, ugly, mean-spirited comments. I refuse to print those comments but let’s just say I choose my words carefully and my friends and clients even more carefully as a lesson learned from these experiences. Although there are parallels to be drawn with the current state of American politics, I’m talking in this article about Carlos Ghosn, former CEO of →
It occurred to me as I watched the results of the Presidential Election that I needed to capture my thoughts. It’s a historic day, one of a very few in a person’s lifetime. I find myself getting emotional and this reaction is a mystery to me. I suppose it is partly a feeling of profound relief that the decision is finally made and we can now get on with the business of living. But It is so much more than this. And I appear not to be alone in getting emotional. Whatever side of the fence you are on, this is a momentous occasion. Every Presidential election is, really. This one more than most because of the extreme divisions in →
These are troubling times for ethical people. Especially in light of the history we are watching unfold before our eyes. Last week we watched a live Senate hearing for a sitting Judge who was accused of sexual assault. The Senate Judicial Committee is trying to determine if Judge Brett Kavanaugh is suitable to be confirmed to the Supreme Court – the highest court in the land. This court was created to provide checks and balances – a division of power between the other two branches of government. As such it is expected to have Justices who can impartially judge cases and apply the law objectively. We witnessed a miracle: Compromise from our elected officials. It is a Rare thing to →
You’ve got a stack of customer invoices to create and bills to pay, all sitting patiently on your desk waiting for your attention. You dread this time of the month because numbers are just not your thing. You hate how long it takes to get the paperwork taken care of, and you don’t understand the results your bookkeeper gives you. It just looks like a list of numbers on a page that has no relation to the activities you’ve completed during the month. And then you hear in the news that a bookkeeper is going to jail for embezzling funds from a small business, a government agency or non-profit organization. Great. Just Great. Just recently, a former bookkeeper for Arizona →
Have you noticed that ethics is in the news everywhere these days? This sometimes hugely unpopular and negatively perceived word is now the latest buzz word. Huh. I guess I was 10 years ahead of my time when I invented e-Factor!®, originally conceived as the “ethics factor”. I woke up with the idea in the wee hours of the morning after leaving the corporate world and an organization where actions and ethical values plainly did not match. As I developed the game and built my business I heard countless experts tell me to “lose the word ethics” because it wouldn’t sell – nobody wanted to be lectured about ethics and ethical conduct. In the early days at networking events I →
Paris, attacked again. Bill O’Reilly leaving Fox under allegations of sexual harassment and $13M in payouts. United passenger dragged off an airplane. Where has all the good news gone?? If we can create “fake news”, why can’t we also create “good news”?
Out of the mouths of babes sometimes come very wise statements. I think we should listen more to these golden nuggets when they occur. We adults just might learn something of value. One such pearl of wisdom came from a young girl scout. Her story was on the CBS evening segment “On the Road” by Steve Hartman which aired here in Phoenix on February 17, 2017. 11-year-old Charlotte McCourt wrote a letter to a customer stating that “the Girl Scout Organization can sometimes use false advertising.” Uh-oh, our adult minds might be screaming – she’s making the organization look bad!!! “Not good”, to coin a phrase….! She was not intentionally trying to harm the Girl Scouts. Instead, she →
“If money is big enough, why not?” was the response to a 60-minutes investigator who asked Stefano Varjas, an inventor from Budapest, Hungary, about whether he would sell his invention, a motorized bicycle accessory, to clients who intended to cheat in bike races. (Click here for the segment entitled “Enhancing the Bike” aired 1/29/17.) The investigator was specifically talking about racers of the Tour de France. And while Varjas would not say if he directly sold the motor to athletes directly, he said cannot say what his clients do with his motor. He also said he knew racers had used it and he participated in investigations of athletes in both the Tour de France and the Olympics. According to →
I recently saw a disturbing 60-Minutes segment called “Not Paid”. Disturbing to me was the lesson that life insurance companies who collect millions of dollars in premiums for death benefits Do Not Pay when a policy holder dies UNLESS the beneficiary specifically contacts the insurance company and makes a claim. WHAT??? Are you kidding??? Huh. Is this an ethical dilemma or what? Apparently this is not a joke, as this is quite common that beneficiaries do not know there is a policy. The attitude of insurance companies is that these policies are contracts and the beneficiary has to follow the terms of the contract. In other words, they have to read the fine print and make a claim to get their →