Hanson Kirk O. - Rotten: Why Corporate Misconduct Continues and What to Do about It

Rotten: Why Corporate Misconduct Continues and What to Do about It — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Rotten: Why Corporate Misconduct Continues and What to Do about It" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...37

Copyright 2021 Marc J. Epstein and Kirk O. Hanson

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Lanark Press, Los Altos, CA
Lanarkpress.com

Production and editorial by Girl Friday Productions
Design: Paul Barrett

Image credits: cover Shutterstock/Freer

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020913419
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-7353361-0-7
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-7353361-1-4
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-7353361-2-1
First edition

Contents

Preface

Corrupt and destructive behavior by executives and businesses of all sizes is a persistent and troubling feature of modern American and global capitalism. Rotten corporate conduct holds back our economic development and sows doubt that business and the free-market system contribute to a better society. Despite decades of attempts to rein in misconduct, the problem continues to fester. There is no industry or national economy that appears to be exempt.

The damage done by corporate misconduct is significant and growing. Billions of dollars of investor money have been lost as a result of fines, lawsuits, and stock market reactions. Consumers have been mistreated and injured and have had their lives disrupted. Employees have been abused and lost their jobs; some have lost their lives. In its various forms, corporate misconduct has imposed significant costs on individuals, communities, industries, and economiesand on the corporations themselves.

Why does corporate misconduct persist? Havent corporations implemented more and more elaborate ethics and compliance programs in recent years? Havent CEOs repeatedly proclaimed to their organizations that integrity is a corporate value? Havent business schools added ethics and corporate responsibility studies to their required curricula? Indeed, all these efforts have occurred, yet none seems to have made a difference.

Why We Wrote This Book

We have spent most of our careers working on questions of business ethics and responsibility. We have been professors at several of the most prominent business schools in the world, including Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD (European Institute of Business Administration), Rice, and Santa Clara. We have advised dozens of major companies on the design of their corporate ethics and responsibility programs and on how to handle scandals that have occurred. We have given untold numbers of speeches to students, executives, and the public.

Regretfully, we have to admit that our efforts and those of so many others in the business world have failed to reduce the plague of repeated misconduct. We have taken a hard look at what we and a host of other individuals and institutions have done to address the problem. This book is an insiders account of what has been attempted to dateand why it has failed.

In the following pages, we examine in depth why corporations misbehave. We evaluate the thus-far-unsuccessful efforts of CEOs, boards, corporate ethics and compliance officers, business ethics professors, and a phalanx of consultants and critics. We conclude there are some things that can be done now to change the sorry record to date, but we believe that the way corporations and society view ethics, compliance, training, and responsibility must change dramatically.

Too often, we hear that greed and misconduct are simply unchangeable features of capitalism. We hear that people, organizations, and the system are all corrupt. We think otherwise. Although we believe the efforts of the past fifty years have indeed failed to stem the tide of corporate scandals, our decades of experience in working with companies, with leaders, and with students also give us some hope. We are convinced that business ethics can be improved significantly through a radical reexamination, rethinking, and redesign of the way people and organizations approach the challenges of creating and sustaining corporate integrity.

We know some have given up on reforming business. Typically, they articulate three specific explanations for the ethical failures of businesses:

1. Some people are bad . Many argue that the blame should be focused on the schools, families, and churches that have failed at teaching the ethics necessary to be a responsible adult. Thus, there is little that companies can do with employees who lack the required ethical foundations. In this book, we call this the bad-apple theory.
2. Some companies are bad . Others argue that it is most often not the fault of the individual employees but rather the systems of incentives, rewards, performance evaluation, governance, and control in organizations that permit and sometimes even encourage unethical behavior. We call this the bad-barrel theory.
3. The economic system itself is bad. Still others suggest that particular industries, geographies, or marketplaces are so corrupted that it is difficult for ethical individuals or organizations to survive unless they adopt the corruption around them. We call this the bad-orchard theory.

We agree that there are indeed bad apples, bad barrels, and bad orchards in virtually every business sector, but we argue that there are ways to manage each and improve corporate behaviorif we are ready to take a significantly different approach to doing so.

This book, in part, was written to address the question that continues to haunt all of us who champion capitalism and the free market: Do the flaws of the market system inevitably lead to unethical and corrupt behavior in business? Is this an unsolvable problem? On this point, we are relatively optimistic. We dont believe every single corrupt action can be eliminated from business, but we do think that the increasingly troubling problem of corporate misbehavior can be reined in and that capitalism can be harnessed to serve the common good more reliably.

Are Things Getting Worse?

While we dont argue here that corporate behavior has necessarily gotten worse in recent years, we certainly dont believe it has gotten better. Misconduct remains prominent in daily headlines, even as other crises plague our world. Companies in our most respected industriesaircraft manufacturers, banks, pharmaceutical developersrepeatedly demonstrate a willful disregard for the interests of employees, customers, business partners, the public, and even shareholders. Consider just a few of the best-known scandals:

• In 2008, widespread financial manipulation and outright fraud by respected banks and mortgage companies brought the economy to its knees. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes and jobs.
• In 2014, General Motors issued a massive recall relating to ignition switches on approximately eight hundred thousand vehicles. In order to avoid expensive required testing, an employee had given a new part the same number as an old part. When it was installed, the new part often failed, leading to over one hundred deaths in unnecessary accidents.
• In 2015, the #MeToo movement on social media caught fire, leading to the public disclosure of some of the worst instances of sexual harassment and exploitation of women in business and finally motivating companies to take action. The Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013, expanded this intense scrutiny to corporate opportunities for all people of color.

An argument for moral decay and failure in business could be built on these cases alone. Most of this kind of behavior occurred in companies that have extensive and long-established ethics programs, anchored by ethics codes that explicitly state the companys commitment to following the law and serving the interests of its stakeholders.

Next page

1234567...37

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Rotten: Why Corporate Misconduct Continues and What to Do about It»

Look at similar books to Rotten: Why Corporate Misconduct Continues and What to Do about It. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Richard H. Girgenti

Managing the Risk of Fraud and Misconduct: Meeting the Challenges of a Global, Regulated and Digital Environment

Nick Arnold

Really Rotten Experiments

Hanson Dave

Slap shot original: the man, the foil, and the legend

Ky-Lee Hanson

Im 30 Now What

The Editors of Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Movies We Love

Monaghan Christopher

Financial crime and corporate misconduct : a critical evaluation of fraud legislation

Shannon Kirk [Kirk

Gretchen

Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism

Terry Deary

The Rotten Romans

Kirk

The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays

Jack Gantos

Rotten Ralph

Jack Gantos

Happy Birthday, Rotten Ralph

Discussion, reviews of the book Rotten: Why Corporate Misconduct Continues and What to Do about It and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.