Ethikos Editor’s Weekly Picks: Otis Elevator’s Judy Marks Talks Leadership, the Future of Manufacturing

By Patrick Gorman for Chief Executive

I require people to be collaborative and to recognize that the sum of all the voices is far more impactful than anything else we could do. And so, I will tell you that I look for leaders who are not only comfortable but focused on empowering and developing the people around them.

And the reason it’s so important to us is with over 1,000 branch offices, we can’t make decisions on a daily basis, sitting here in headquarters, nor can any of our regional headquarters. We have to empower our local leaders. We have to make sure they understand our fundamentals, and our foundations, and our values and our ethics. But we then have to give them the tools and the ability to make decisions.  Read more

By Maura Lerner for Minneapolis Star Tribune

A decade ago, Roger Lindmark gave $300,000 to his alma mater, St. John’s University in Collegeville, to create a summer fellowship for students interested in corporate ethics.

Now he’s demanding his money back, saying the school bungled the program by paying students to study such unrelated topics as “romance in the workplace” and “wonderment in the classroom.” Read more

By Peter Eavis for The New York Times

Wall Street’s front-line regulator intends to keep pushing big banks to improve their ethics.

The new president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, John C. Williams, on Monday gave his backing to his predecessor’s campaign to clean up bank culture. “I do commit to continue the New York Fed’s leadership on this in future years,” he said at a New York Fed conference on bank governance. Read more

By Enrique Dans for Forbes

In the absence of corporate ethics employees are increasingly speaking out against their company when they feel it has crossed the line: Google staff have spoken out against the Department of Defense’s Maven Project, a lucrative image recognition contract that many other technology companies have chosen to keep quiet about. Opposition to Google’s role in a project clearly designed to kill people began with some resignations, continued with a letter signed by thousands of employees, and ended with the non-renewal of the contract with the Department of Defense as well as the publication of a series of ethical principles that will supposedly guide the company’s role in developing artificial intelligence.  Read more