The faculty at Harvard not only teach elective courses in business ethics, they also hold seminars. As recently as 2004, HBS began offering a full-length ethics course known as “Leadership and Corporate Accountability”. In addition, lectures are held throughout the year that focus on various angles from social enterprise to keeping integrity in today’s profit-at-all-costs culture.

The London Business School (LBE) offers “Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility” as one of its core courses in its prestigious MBA program. LBE has led the way in that it was one of the first top-ranked business schools to offer an ethics component in its curriculum.

MIT – through the Sloan School of Management also offers business ethics courses, and you can even review one of its course assignments through the OpenCourseWare titled: Ethical Practice: Professionalism, Social Responsibility, and the Purpose of the Corporation

If you’re looking for an online business ethics program, then the University of North Carolina, which offers a general course, a course on Corporate Social Responsibility and one on issues in Business Ethics. There are many options overall, some expensive, some are more affordable. Some require you to come to campus, and some can be online. Ultimately, the ideal solution depends on your time commitments and experience needed.

One of the challenges of the 21st century onwards will be teaching discipline in business. Current college students and MBA graduates are thinking “free agent” style. With outsourcing and instability, many companies no longer see workers as long term, and employees are starting to develop that ideas as well. This mutual mistrust will displace the discipline in business that is crucial to successful, healthy and profitable ventures.

So here are a few simple ways to change that:
*Companies commit to investing in individuals, by identifying the skilled and talented.
*Offer them more training, quicker promotions – make it clear that this is a merit-based environment.
*Cut down on bureaucracy, company politics, and all the nonsense that makes employees wonder if the company is being fair.

One notable example is SEMCO of Brazil. They’ve developed a culture of trust with their employees which include programs like Retire A Little (allowing employees to take a day or two of extra per week in exchange for work later). Doing away with titles and offices (yes, that really does instill discpline). Making salaries public (so everybody know what everyone else makes). Allow employees to set their own salaries (they have a couple safeguards built in to prevent sheer madness). No wonder corporations from around the world visit their offices to see how they do it. So many tools and real life examples of teaching discipline in business. You just have to take the initiative!

The method is akin and similar to other professional seminars you might have attended previously as part of your career training. However – because the subject is somewhat sensitive some individuals will tend to be more outspoken than others – which can directly impact what you take back to your organization at the end of the seminar.

So a couple of key points to keep in mind, is that, prepare a list of questions and concerns you have. Keep it long – don’t worry, you’ll see that many of your colleagues will come up with similar concerns, and they will be addressed. As these questions are asked you can whittle down your list, and ask the ones that you feel are relevant from the list you have. One of the most important things when attending a business ethics seminar or any seminar as a matter of fact, is that the fast pace means you have to be prepared beforehand.

In a course or online training classes, you’re basically responding to the modules and answering questions. Here the interactivity is at a higher level, and you’ll be expected to join in with your thoughts and comments. Over the years, you’ve probably seen a number of situations that you might have been confused as to what is the right decision?

Your business ethics seminar will feature distinguished professors and lawyers with years of experience in the field. They will be able to analyze with you, and point out differences in situations that might be similar at first, but from an ethics standpoint are amazingly different.

Employees will not know how to differentiate between what is acceptable and not acceptable – especially since the days of everything being crystal clear are gone. The complexities of a global economy bring with it murky waters of what might be standard business practice in one country, but against the law in another.

One way to keep the level of training up without sacrificing the budget, is to have employees sign up for online ethics training. Its really a smart way to get the job done. With Powerpoint presentations, whiteboards, instant communication, and all the technology available – even groups of employees can collaborate and then discuss after-class, the applications of the training classes to their work and their industry. A lot of time and cost is saved this way and everybody is all the more better for it.

Another benefit is that less time is spent on travel (actually there’s no commuting time), so a lot of man hours are saved that would otherwise have been a drain on the company’s resources. You might think that there is just one generic course out there, but the reality is that you can customize the curriculum to suit your organization’s needs. You can provide your own login information, logos, and customize the look and feel of everything from the presentation to the material to the certificate of completion. In the end its the most affordable way of providing the tools your employees need to make better decisions in the corporate workplace.

There are independent companies who offer ethics hotlines, you could use their services, as they will have professional staff who know their stuff, or you could start your own in-house hotline by hiring a knowledgeable consultant or two to work on staff.

Ethics hotlines handle all kinds of matters. They can help you to write up workplace policies and answer yours or an employees questions about ethical practices. They can also provide an anonymous way for those within the company to report a breach of ethics without fear of recourse.

Ethics hotlines should be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every single day of the year. Multiple methods must be utilized: e-mail, telephone (toll-free), internet, fax and even standard mail. They can handle everything from accounting issues to theft to breach of confidentiality to misconduct, suggestions and more. Callers can remain anonymous.

It is good in a multi-cultural workplace to offer a multi-lingual service. An ethics hotline can provide incident reporting, follow-up, case management, and guidance.

Whether your company is large or small, if ethics is an important concern for you, an ethics hotline can be a golden key to your company’s success. An ethical company is one who follows through on their promises, never taking advantage of clients and always leaving a good taste in the customer’s mouth.

This will retain that customer and earn you even more through the word of mouth reputation.

Happy customers = happy profitable businesses = happy employees… and happy employees are the most likely to always adhere to a code of ethics.

The need of the hour is with the basic necessities: food, electricity, heating and so on. You need food on the table, the lights on, and a comfortably warm living space to make it home. Beyond that if you don’t have a car – you can take public transport. If you can’t afford a phone line – you can get a prepaid cell phone. If you can’t afford new books – the library is there.

Many organizations have been working to provide foodstuffs to low and fixed-income people. Another avenue is providing them with help in paying their electricity bills. I’m aware that many utilities already do offer programs – but they would do well to increase their generosity by allowing more people to participate and offering more rebates and discounts.

Its not only the right thing to do – its a must thing to do. Electricity is a must have – and a need nowadays (who can argue with that?) – for the people that live in urban centers of the world. They need access to electricity to run the heater, and turn the fan on.

Without such programs many elderly and small children can be at risk. Also we should have some concerted effort to provide the ability to compare programs and see which electricity supplier offers the best or the right program for a specific household. One such blog is Electricity Price Comparison which provides tips and ideas on reducing your electricity bill along with information on utility rate changes and average utility costs for business, residential and commercial usage.

By having private corporations focus their non-profit efforts on the things that really matter – they will automatically do a better job of increasing their public awareness, it will be a natural public relations effort, and the country as a whole will be all the more better for it.

If you are looking to get an undergraduate or an MBA degree – hopefully you will take a few ethics classes but my friend Jeff Miller from bizethics.org reports that ethics requirements have been dropping and are the credits that were required previously are no longer required nowadays.

Although the article was written in 2003 – here we are in 2010, seven years later still reeling from the lack or ethics (and common sense) as exotic financial instruments were derived, packaged and sold en masse that would eventually result in the real estate bubble that burst and brought down the economies of the world with it.

I think the article is as relevant today as it was when Jeff wrote it, and I am providing a link to the entire PDF document here: Curriculum Vital: Ethics Courses in Business Schools

I’ve thought about this and I genuinely think that Google decided that they would no longer sacrifice globally accepted values in order to gain a foothold in China. That has to be applauded. However there’s too much of a gray area to accurately pinpoint what exactly was the motive – or was it a combination of motives?

One thing is clear, Google wouldn’t throw in the towel so quickly. With its search engine technology and being a global brand, it has no reason not to wait it out. Even if expectations were not being met, Google could easily hold on. It would have no problem convincing employees, shareholders, and everybody else because of the huge size of the Chinese market.

That leads us to the second point. Take a look at the figures of Chinese internet users and the swiftly rising middle class. For confirmation you can read Martin Jacques’ book “When China Rules the World” if you are in doubt. Why would Google do such a thing – unless something went really awry – it seems Google is really trying to make a stand.

Students who succeed in my classes learn to apply canonical ethical theory to contemporary business dilemmas, wrestling with their values and reconsidering the proper role of business in society. That is not easily done. It can be daunting for business students to re-evaluate their own views about, and relationship to, the corporate world they are about to enter as potential leaders. But once they get a taste for it, their intellectual curiosity blossoms. A few years ago, I added to my syllabus a section on consumer ethics, forcing students to confront issues of personal choice and responsibility. If consumers spent more responsibly, there would be fewer market failures; the same goes for investors. So how self-interested should we be? To grapple with such questions is to do applied ethics.

It remains to be seen if many business professors will achieve tenure by doing ethics properly speaking. Most of what now gets published in top business journals under the rubric of “ethics” is limited to empirical studies of the success of various policies presumed as ethical (”the effects of management consistency on employee loyalty and efficiency,” perhaps). Although valuable, such research does precious little to hone the mission of business itself.

While the public clamors for the return of managerial leadership in ethics and social responsibility, surprisingly little research on the subject exists, and what does get published doesn’t appear in the top journals. The reasons are varied, but perhaps more than anything it’s that those journals are exclusively empirical: Take The Academy of Management Review, the only top journal devoted to management theory. Its mission statement says it publishes only “testable knowledge-based claims.” Unfortunately, that excludes most of what counts as ethics, which is primarily a conceptual, a priori discipline akin to law and philosophy. We wouldn’t require, for example, that theses on the nature of justice or logic be empirically testable, although we still consider them “knowledge based.”

The major business journals have a responsibility to open the ivory-tower gates to a priori arguments on the ethical nature and mission of business. After all, the top business schools, which are a model for the rest, are naturally interested in hiring academics who publish in the top journals. One solution is for at least one or two of the top journals to rewrite their mission statements to expressly include articles applying ethical theory to business. They could start by creating special ethics sections in the same way that some have already created critical-essay sections. Another solution is for academics to do more reading and referencing of existing business-ethics journals. Through more references in the wider literature, those journals can rise to the top. Until such changes occur, business ethics will largely remain a second-class area of research, primarily concerned with teaching.

The estimated amount of $20 million is about 100 times,  Sujata Sachdeva’s 2008 compensation which was around $200K.

Just unraveling this thing will be a huge mess. It will be a beast to tangle not to mention that if this went on for some years (news reports are estimating it was 4 years in the making) then other small primarily family owned companies that are thinly traded like Koss might have similar issues that have yet to surface.

Koss would certainly appear to be an exception with such a huge amount but it says something about financial controls at other firms. Perhaps a hundred baby Enrons in the making.

Its not fair to say that business ethics training would have averted such a financial disaster – but along with tighter controls – such embezzlement might have been corrected earlier and at lower cost.

With such a high unemployment rate you don’t want companies laying honest employees off and shutting its doors because of the actions of one executive. But that’s what one executive can do if given the reins in such an unchecked way as we seem to have in this case.