Conflicts of interest in serving on another company’s board of directors
Some codes of conduct and C&E policies and certifications identify outside board service as a potential COI. What should an analysis of COIs of this sort entail? This is a topic about which...
View ArticleConflicts of Interest in the News – 012112 edition: Did Al Gore Have a COI at...
Once again, conflicts of interest were much in the news this week – most prominently concerning payments to health care professionals by life science companies. But potentially the most intriguing...
View ArticleConflict of Interest Policies for Non-Profit Organizations
An earlier posting discussed the important – and certainly non-intuitive – finding of behavioral ethics research that doing good can actually increase the risk of doing bad. In addition to an...
View ArticleCEOs’ COIs
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “The rich are different than you and me,” and, along the same lines, CEO conflicts of interest can be pretty different than those involving people like you and...
View ArticleTraining Directors on Conflicts of Interest: Six Pillars of Awareness
What do directors need to know about COIs – meaning, for our purposes, what should go into the COI-related training and other communications that they receive? First, they should be trained on their...
View ArticleCatching up on directors’ conflicts of interest
Directors’ conflicts of interest are one of the favorite topics of this blog. Among our prior posts on this subject are this one on what to cover when training directors on COIs , this one on...
View ArticleCatching up on CEO COIs
As noted in a previous post, CEO’s tend to have different COIs than the rest of us. Today’s post will look at a few CEO-related COI stories that have been in the news lately. Most notably, yesterday...
View ArticleEthics training – making it real: part two of our interview with Steve Priest
In today’s post we conclude our interview with Steve Priest. Information about Steve, and Part One of the interview, can be found here. Should ethics training be a stand-alone offering or is ethics...
View ArticleBehavioral ethics teaching and training
In “Teaching Behavioral Ethics” – which will be published next year by the Journal of Legal Studies Education, and a draft of which can be found here - Robert Prentice of the McCombs School of...
View ArticleCatching up on backdating
Many years ago, I heard a businessman who had been convicted of tax fraud describe how he and his confederates had, while their crime was underway, minimized the wrongfulness of what they were doing,...
View ArticleAre private companies more ethical than public ones?
To those in the C&E field, the notion that privately held companies could, as a group, be more ethical than publicly held ones seems implausible. After all, public companies are required by law to...
View ArticleCEOs’ ethical standards and the limits of compliance
I’m not one who sees ethics and compliance as operating in wholly distinct spheres, and have long felt that they closely complement each other. (For more on the general relationship between the two...
View ArticleFriendship – and the ties that blind (directors to conflicts of interest)
King Herod the Great had something of a problem: he had backed the losing side in the contest between Marc Antony and Octavian to rule Rome, and now fully expected to lose his life for it. But, as...
View ArticleThe cost of director and officer conflicts of interest just went up
In the vast realm of conflicts of interest those involving boards of directors tend to stand out. That is because part of the reason the role of corporate director even exists is to mitigate the...
View ArticleMore on conflicts of interest and corporate boards
Director COIs are in the news again. First, the Wall Street Journal reported last week: “Generic-drug maker Mylan NV moved into new headquarters in December 2013 after buying vacant land in an office...
View ArticleConflicts of interest and nonprofit organizations
The settlement by President Trump of a lawsuit brought by the NY Attorney General claiming that the Trump Foundation misused funds to benefit his 2016 campaign was attention getting not only because of...
View Article“Corporate Law for Good People”
Compliance programs have long been viewed (at least by me) as a “delivery device” for bringing behavioral ethics ideas and information into the workplace. And now something similar can be said about...
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