Thinking Ethics

Review of CSR education

Ethical corporation in association with EABIS (European Academy of Business in Society)publishes a review of corporate responsibility education, profiling leading business schools and universities for CSR courses and modules. Aimed at people who want to do a MBA with a CSR focus, a Master's degree in sustainability-type courses or executive education for in-house CSR teams.  Download from www.ethicalcorp.com/cre

ISO standard on social responsibility

From csrwire here is the press release fro the International Organization for Standardization on the development of the future ISO 26000 standard on social responsibility. It will draw on the best practices developed bz existing public and private sector social responsibility initiatives.

In defence of journalism

Journalism has become a rather precarious profession. The statistics for journalists killed, imprisoned and tortured make depressing reading. Then there is that casual contempt for the craft revealed by Cherie Blair signing the Hutton report for a party fund raiser, not to mention the slipping ratings for trust in the opinion polls. And all of that is before you get to the challenge to professional journalism from a combination of Google, bloggers and “citizen journalists”.

 Google News is ready willing and able to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Powerful stuff. But it begs a question about judgment. What information? How reliable is it? Can we trust you? As long as a Google search is based on how many seek it out there will be a question mark. Which is where journalism comes back into the frame. And the job it can do of offering some kind of order and analysis. Sorting the wheat from the chaff, verifying whether what is apparently real is actually so.

That requires eye witnesses – journalists be they professional or “citizen”. But it also requires experts whose role is to provide what Mark Thomson, the BBC’s Director General, has  called “critical realism”. People who accept that information comes in complex narratives and that sophisticated analysis is needed to make sense of them but who “believe it is still possible to get to the facts and form as objective and accurate a view of the world as possible.”

In a world where the pressure is on to declare whose side are you on, there is still a value in giving readers, listener, viewers, consumers and citizens the tools they need to make sense of what is going on to make their own informed choices. What Thompson called “the common ground in which different perspectives and different value systems can debate with each other and can be independently scrutinized and assessed”. Journalism – accurate, effective, impartial and reflective journalism – is essential to that.

Vigilantism on the web in China

I am getting a bit concerned about all the articles coming out about mob behaviour on the web in China. Apparently people are banding together to solve old crimes, hound adulterers, and enforce their own morality. It smacks of the same behaviour that led to the excesses of the cultural revolution. Maybe this is a cultural bent in China, that groups auto-proclaim the accepted morality, and who follows it and who does not. The Chinese do it in groups, and this rather public whistleblowing has no referee or judge but the mob opinion. The French on the other hand tend to do it alone. The potential for abuse and misuse in both cases (i.e. Clearstream for France) from a cultural trait perspective is very worrying.

Director's liability

Interesting article in the Washington Post by Brooke A. Masters entitled "Enron's Quiet Outages - uncharged in the fraud, Directors settled, resigned, lay low".

Apparently, some people consider that the members of the Board got off lightly. They were not prosecuted in the Bankruptcy case. Some of them had to resign from their other Board positions. They were also sued by some of the investors, claiming insider trading, as the 18 directors could profit by selling their shares while they had information about the real situtation of Enron.  Last year 10 of the directors paid $ 13 million to settle the suit. The amount was based on 10% of the profit the directors realized from the sale of their Enron stock. There was also a payment of $ 155 million from the officers and directors liability insurance policy, that covered the other 8 directors. These insurance policies are increasingly expensive and hard to make, as the insurance companies are becoming reluctant to issue them (D&O policies).

It might still be possible for a corporation to contract a D&O policy, but it is practically impossible for an independent director to cover his several board positions in this manner. As the role of the Director of the Board becomes more professional, and that some people specialize in this type of mandate, then an insurance policy geared towards the director and not the company would be a useful proposal.

Business Ethics awards

Business Ethics magazine is looking for companies with exemplary practices in a variety of areas for their eighteenth annual business ethics awards. The 2006 awards categories are: corporate governance; environmental sustainability; stakeholder accountability; general excellence.

Proposals can be emailed to  [email protected] before June 19th, 2006. The awards will be published in their Fall issue.