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 →
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 →
Aren’t you tired of all the terrible news? 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”?
In starting my research for this blog post I found a USA Today headline reading “Trump delivers the death blow to ethics.” Well That’s an Understatement! Presidential advisers pitching products, releasing fake news, accepting positions for which they have no qualifications or experience, fighting with federal judges, name calling, dismantling laws without considering consequences, brushing off conflicts of interest as irrelevant… Have I missed any???! If this isn’t the death of ethics I don’t know what is.
“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 the →