Ethikos Weekly Editor’s Picks – December 11, 2014

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Editor’s Top Choice:

Beyond Tone from the Top: Driving a Culture of Ethics and Compliance to Engage Managers & Employees

From Aarti Maharaj contributing to SCCE’s Compliance & Ethics Blog:

Focusing beyond “tone from the top” presents a difficult challenge for many ethics and compliance professionals – especially for global companies with middle management and employees from many locations, time zones and cultures.

According to a recent NYSE Governance Services thought leadership roundtable discussion held at AECOM’s headquarters in Los Angeles, which featured Eric Morehead, senior compliance counsel, NYSE Governance Services, and Paul Gennaro, senior vice president and chief communications officer, AECOM, the return on investment on an effective ethics and compliance program can be seen when employees understand and are actively involved in promoting a culture of integrity. Read more


Other Featured Picks of the Week

Tech Companies and Social Networks Need an Ethical Body to Rebuild Trust

From Jemima Kiss of The Guardian:

Do you use a fitness tracker? Online banking? Do you shop online, use a messaging app, download music, use email, file your tax return online or let your children play games on your iPad?

How much do you trust the services and technologies you use?

Most of us will admit to a creeping sense of mistrust about the technology we have come to rely on. Many users have come to feel quietly contemptuous of these services, as if our default relationships with them is that they offer us a sheet of novel-length terms and conditions designed for us not to read and in return we agree to be advertised to, or about, or to be tracked and monitored, however ineffectively or, worse, to be surveilled by the government, and we grudgingly accept it and carry on. Read more


Ethical Businesses Honour the Whistleblowers

Harvey Schachter, Special to The Globe and Mail:

Lots of people at General Motors knew about the faulty ignition switch. But nothing happened to change the situation. Enron had a concerned whistleblower, but she couldn’t change the course of the company before it was too late.

For many people, that’s proof companies are too fixated on profit so ethics – at best – takes second place or that corporate suites are filled with unethical people. But Mark Pastin, who has spent 35 years as an ethical consultant to companies and is president of the Council of Ethical Organizations, a non-profit that promotes ethical conduct by businesses, doesn’t buy that argument. Read more


Why a Corporate Scandal Will Follow You Even If You Weren’t Involved

From Vince Molinaro of The Harvard Business Review:

A few years ago, my team and I were launching a leadership development program for a client. Just before we launched the pilot program, the company was hit with a high-profile scandal. A couple of rogue executives were caught playing around with the company’s finances and millions of dollars went missing. The ensuing scandal rocked this once-great company, leaving its reputation in tatters. The executives were charged.

When we kicked off the pilot session a few months later, the scandal quickly became the elephant in the room. It was clear the participants needed a forum to express their personal views on those events. We could feel their deep-seated anger, and we realized we had to bring it out into the open.

Many of the participants admitted they were now embarrassed to work for the company. Others said they were once so proud of where they worked that they now felt empty inside. There was another group of leaders who felt a real sense of resentment; they feared that the reputation of all of the company’s leaders was negatively tainted. They were already seeing a change in relationships with customers and vendors. Trust had eroded. Read more


The 10 Communication Commandments That Drive Reputation and Business

Cheryl Conner, contributor to Forbes:

I have come to a bold realization this week: Researchers predict that reputation score will soon matter more than credit scores for individuals and businesses in the burgeoning “reputation economy” now emerging online.

However, a new SaaS software company, The World Table, believes the issues of bad or insufficient reputation are entirely fixable. All it would take is adherence to 10 easy rules. The curator of these practices is my personal friend Randall Paul who has quietly been refining these principles (along with a new technology platform) together with co-founder and partner Bryan Hall over the last several years.

After years as a real estate entrepreneur, Paul obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought where he developed a way to improve the most intractable cases of social conflict. He calls his practices for difficult conversations between rivals or critics The Way of Openness. I promptly tagged it The 10 Communication Commandments, as they resonate so fully with the vision of authentic PR and reputation I’ve been writing about as of late. Fast forward to today. Read more