The Soul of Citigroup

"What senior executives are more worried about is the impact their missteps will ultimately have on their souls. So while they apparently couldn’t get a man of the cloth to sign on as a paid consultant, Citi did find a Princeton professor who specializes in ethics and theology to lend a hand.”

This paragraph, excerpted from a recent article in Vanity Fair, mirrors what similar articles in The Wall Street Journal and Morningstar have highlighted. Which is Citigroup's hiring of Professor David Miller to be an on-call ethicist for the firm.

To read the complete article, click here.

Making Your Company More Ethical

Recently two scholars associated with the University of Pennsylvania published a short article in the Harvard Business Review on What You Can Do to Improve Ethics at Your Company. This advice is based on a study of a sample of C-Suite executives from around the world as well as on the experience the authors gleaned from their own consulting practices.

The 30 leaders in the study recalled a total of 87 “major” ethical dilemmas from their career histories. More than 50 had occurred in the course of the last five years. Another surprise was how few of the incidents were caused by bribery, corruption, or anti-competition issues (only 16 percent of all ethical dilemmas mentioned). More often the dilemmas were the result of competing interests, misaligned incentives, clashing cultures.

Their advice is simple, clear and very practical.

Five Reasons Why Ethical People Are Provoked into Unethical Decisions

In a very concise article in the Harvard Business Review, Ron Carucci, founder and managing partner at Navalent, discusses five ways in which organizations enable and even encourage good people to make unethical choices. “Despite good intentions, organizations set themselves up for ethical catastrophes by creating environments in which people feel forced to make choices they could never have imagined.”

Whistleblowers: Not just corporate tattle-tales, but actual change agents.

In a Fair Game column in the New York Times, Gretchen Morgensen reported on a research study by Assistant Professor Jaron H. Wilde at the University of Iowa that found “a sharp and lasting drop in financial wrongdoing at companies that were subject to whistle-blower investigation.” While, this finding seems quite reasonable from an intuitive perspective, it is very gratifying to have some hard empirical evidence that whistleblowers do provide some measureable value to the companies being whistle blowed upon.

It's Time to Look in the Ethical Mirror

With all the new coverage of Wells Fargo's fake-account debacle, I (Professor Robert Giacalone) have yet to see an answer to this pivotal question: How does one simply miss more than 5,300 wrongdoers at a bank?

How can so many employees across so many branches go "off the rails" and no one know about it? The easiest answer: This was an ingrained practice. By firing so many employees, Wells has all but acknowledged that unethical behavior was rampant. Rather than a needle in a haystack, the huge number of employees opening sham accounts was an overt sign of an organizational culture problem.

Perhaps most frightening is that the ethical deficit in business is not limited to banking or to the United States. So what has caused this ethical breakdown?

Click here to read more.