Just a short note to mention that I'm leaving Open Salon (or rather that no new postings will appear here).

I'm now blogging (professionally) for Canadian Business magazine, at http://www.canadianbusiness.com , and my exclusive deal with them means cutting off the feed to OS.

You can a… Read full post »

What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of businesspeople do you think worthy of imitation?

The world’s most successful investor, Warren Buffett, was recently caught up in a scandal. He himself is not accused of any wrongdoing, though some… Read full post »

Just whose fault is it if your laptop gets stolen at Starbucks? Do coffee shops (and other similar businesses) have a responsibility to help curb such crimes? If so, how far does that responsibility go?

To kick the topic off, here’s a story by Michael Wilson, for the NY Times: As… Read full post »

As regular readers know, I’ve blogged a lot about the vocabulary we use to talk about ‘doing the right thing’ in business. Here’s another example of a term that some people seem to want to use to capture that entire topic: “Social Impact.”

See for example this piec… Read full post »

Lying, generally, is wrong. Is it also wrong to facilitate a lie, or to profit from doing so? What if your entire business model involves helping people tell lies? No, I’m not talking about the big accounting firms, who only sometimes help clients lie, and typically do so through creative inter… Read full post »

This one’s a real tempest in a teapot. Or rather, in a bottle of nail polish.

OK, so here’s the short version. Clothing chain J. Crew’s latest catalog includes a picture of president and creative director Jenna Lyons painting her young son’s toenails pink. Yes, pink &md… Read full post »

The connection between reputation and ethics is complex. A pattern of ethical behaviour is clearly essential to establishing a good reputation, which for a company means a reputation as the kind of company people want to do business with. But hold on. All that’s really essential, from a busines… Read full post »

The notion that some companies are “too big to fail” — too large and too interconnected with the rest of the economy for their failure to be permitted by government — is lamentably familiar to most of us in the wake of the 2007-2010 financial crisis. The term has most famously… Read full post »

A couple of people have asked me recently about what business ethics issues arise in the wake of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis. As far as I’ve seen, the media hasn’t paid much attention to business ethics issues, or even on businesses at all, in their coverag… Read full post »

Innovation is a hot topic these days, and has been an important buzzword in business for some time. As Simon Johnson and James Kwak point out in their book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, innovation is almost by definition taken to be a good thing.… Read full post »

A scientist employed by the US Food and Drug Administration has been arrested and charged with insider trading.

Here’s the story, from Diana B. Henriques at the New York Times: U.S. Chemist Is Charged With Insider Stock Trades

A 15-year veteran of the federal Food and Drug Administration and h

… Read full post »

This is the third in a 3-part series on the ethics of profit. (See also Part 1 and Part 2.) As mentioned in previous postings, we should distinguish between our ethical evaluation of profit per se (which, after all, just means financial “gain”), and our ethical evaluation of the pr… Read full post »

Friday I gave a talk as part of a terrific workshop on the ethics and law of financial speculation, held at the University of Montreal. (The event was co-sponsored by U of M’s Centre for Business Law and the Centre for Research in Ethics.)

As I mentioned in a posting last… Read full post »

A few days ago at the airport I stopped to have my shoes shined professionally, something I rarely do. The service was excellent. The guy doing the work was pleasant and knowledgeable, and the results were beautiful. The price, revealed at the end of the process: $6.75. I gave the guy… Read full post »

This is the second in a 3-part series on the ethics of profit.

As I noted in the first in this series, profit is often subject to ethical criticism. But the reasons for that are not clear. To begin our analysis, we need to distinguish between the ethical evaluation of profit… Read full post »

This is the first of a 3-part series on the ethics of profit.

Is making a profit ethically good, or bad, or neutral? Or, better still, are there situations in which making a profit is either good, or bad, or neutral?

Profit is often the subject of criticism. The film, “The… Read full post »

Motives, especially corporate ones, are hard to figure. Some people, of course, are skeptical about the notion that an abstract entity like a corporation can have motives (or intentions or beliefs of attitudes or any of those sorts of things), even though we all have a tendency to talk about corporat… Read full post »

In yesterday’s blog entry, I mentioned that I was attending the Global Ethics Summit in New York. I was there in part because I had been asked to moderate a panel, the topic of which was “Tone from the Middle: Who, Why and How?” It’s a great topic. I’ve long said… Read full post »

I’m currently attending the Global Ethics Summit in New York. In reality, despite its name, the GES is not just about ethics per se, but about ethics and legal compliance. Those of us who spend time thinking about corporate behaviour in terms of ethics are sometimes tempted to downplay the sign… Read full post »

I blogged nearly two weeks ago about the Ethics of Doing Business in Libya. The concern there was about the ethics of involvement in Libya by, well, “businesses” in the traditional, i.e., corporate, sense of that word. But the controversy that emerged short after that, and that continues… Read full post »

This is the 3rd in a series of occasional postings on the role of critical thinking in business ethics.Critical thinking is about a) how to construct good arguments, and b) how to spot and avoid bad ones. The focus of this posting will be on the latter. Bad arguments come in… Read full post »

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has just announced its intention to exercise oversight over levels of pay on Wall Street. Is this an example of overreaching regulation, or of justified intervention in the public interest?

Here are the details, from Ben Protess and Susanne Craig, on the NY… Read full post »

Amidst the upheaval in Libya, questions arise about foreign companies doing business there. Many firms, of course, are pulling out and evacuating any employees currently on the ground, for obvious reasons related to safety. But there are apparently still a few reasonably safe places in Libya,… Read full post »

While actor Charlie Sheen may not be a ‘toxic asset’ in the technical sense, he’s clearly become too much of a liability for the companies who have thus far been profiting richly from his services.

In case you don’t already know all the gory details, here’s one v… Read full post »

Naturally, when any organization suffers unanticipated expenses, it’s going to have to find ways to make up the shortfall in its budget. That’s exactly what happened to Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the provincially-owned power company responsible for generating about 70% of all the pow… Read full post »