Business law and ethics

Comments for this Make Your Case installment are now closed. Thanks to all who participated. This week’s guest commentator, Marshall Goldsmith, has posted his response to your comments and shared some thoughts of his own below. The opening to your cube is darkened by the familiar figure of a longtime colleague. Though you’re his immediate […]

Most experienced negotiators are comfortable working out the terms of an economic contract--they bargain for the best price, haggle over equity splits,...

Lessons from a health care system in Texas.

When Ben Franklin wrote Poor Richard’s Almanac and the words, “A little neglect may breed great mischief,” he did not have price fixing in mind. To the 47 executives in companies in the folding-box industry convicted of price fixing, however, the words seem tailored to fit. In those companies convicted under antitrust laws in 1976, […]

In the wake of a series of gross corporate abuses around the turn of the century, Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley, which was intended to make corporate...

Executives who want to make their organizations better corporate citizens face many obstacles: If they undertake costly initiatives that their rivals...

The turmoil at OpenAI offers five lessons - and one dire warning.

Three important trends are emerging in the U.S. and EU.

It claims Apple's plan to give users more control over their data will harm small businesses. But the facts don't add up.

In Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story, Kurt Eichenwald relates how Enron’s leaders engaged in massive book-cooking with little interference from the dozens of managers, lawyers, and advisers who had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Similarly, at Parmalat, employees not involved in the Italian dairy giant’s fraud apparently were aware of […]

As the 1990s overtake us, public interest in ethics is at a historic high. While the press calls attention to blatant derelictions on Wall Street, in the defense industry, and in the Pentagon, and to questionable activities in the White House, in the attorney general’s office, and in Congress, observers wonder whether our society is […]

In the juiciest political sex scandals, revelations of hypocrisy are often the chief source of glee. There's nothing quite like discovering that a representative...

It’s big news when a 168-year-old dies; it’s even bigger news when the demise is self-inflicted. On Thursday, responding to the astonishing (even for British tabloids) phone-hacking and police-paying charges, News International said that it would shutter its News of the World after one more issue this coming Sunday. The company’s predicament and how it […]

The internet runs on trading personal data for free services - and we can't figure out if it's a fair trade until we acknowledge that.

If there's one thing that the past decade's business disasters should teach us, it's that we need to stop evaluating corporate leaders simply on the basis...

If business schools are to consistently produce outstanding ethical leaders, they should not only focus on teaching ethics in the right way and living up to the right honor code, as Aine Donovan writes. They also need to do a much better job of filtering the people they invite into their exclusive cadres. I say […]

Even social butterflies need places to withdraw.

They've set up teams of psychologists, anthropologists, forensics experts, and others.

Jim, an employee of the nuclear division of Fairway Electric, discovered a report written fifteen years ago about a flaw in the design of their Radon...

Here are the Fortune 100 companies with the best and worst policies.