Thinking Ethics

Stakeholder of the global society

When Klaus Schwab, the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland launched his organization in 1971, he was promoting the partnership or stakeholder concept. An idea that was incredibly novel at the time. He now goes further in a talk at the Foreign Affairs University in Beijing and calls for stakeholders of the global society - check out his speech "Innovation, collaboration and new forms of governance" here.

Finally, say on executive pay?

I have been wondering about the driver for say on executive pay for several years. There is only one word for CEO compensations at 350 times the average salary (or even lowest salary) and that is INDECENT! But I thought that it would be the institutional investors, banding together, that would be able to bring transparency into the process, and then be able to weigh in. And in fact in some countries we now have a consultation of executive compensation (mostly termination packages and golden parachutes) by the shareholders during the Annual General Meeting. But it is slow in changing. If there is one silver lining out of the financial crisis and meltdown - it is that because it is the government and indirectly the  taxpayers that are bailing out these financial institutions, there will be conditions attached, and the compensation question is one of them.  So I think the era of big salaries and bonuses is over. This is the tipping point - the watershed moment. And I have even heard talk about asking for some of the past compensation to be reimbursed!

Game on evolution

-Will Wright has devolopped a new video game called Spore - to give players, and hopefully kids, a taste of evolution and science.  You start with single cell microbes and follow them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures. For once that I find a game that does not have killing or car crashes in it.... Read all about the development of this game in this article in The New York Times by Carl Zimmer entitled "Gaming evolves". Also check out their website http://www.spore.com , the game should be available as of Sept. 7th.