Where’s the Line ?

Those familiar with the online classified ads site, Craigslist, know that you can get just about anything you want on it. Even naughty things. The site has a whole section dedicated to those advertising “erotic services.” These include escorts, erotic dancers, dominatrixes and sometimes even outright prostitutes.

Until Thursday, Nov. 6, advertising erotic services on Craigslist was free. But, as part of a deal with some 40 state attorneys general trying to crack down on the promotion of illegal activities online, the site has opted to charge a fee for erotic services ads. Craigslist CEO, Jim Buckminster, said the move “raises the accountability for people posting to the category.”

That sounds like a bit of a pipe dream, but the move does come hard on the heels of the rejection by the voters of San Francisco — where Craigslist is based — to decriminalize prostitution.

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On Oct. 19, Nike ran its fifth annual Nike Women’s Marathon, in San Francisco. Runners raised some $18 million for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The official winner of this year’s run was announced as Nora Colligan, of Austin, TX. Her time? 3:06.

But wait a second. Arien O’Connell, a 24-year-old school teacher from New York City ran the 26.2 miles in just 2:55:11, almost five minutes ahead of Colligan.

So why did Nike proclaim Colligan the winner? Evidently, some marathoners are more equal than others. The race was divided into two groups: the “elite” runners — the ones Nike believed actually had a chance to contend for the blue ribbon — and the schlubs just shuffling and puffing along for charity’s sake. The elites start their marathon some 20 minutes before the riff-raff start theirs.

The fact that school-marm O’Connell beat out the elite Colligan for time is certainly an embarrassing PR situation for Nike, but it also presents the company with an ethical dilemma. In a time-based foot race, the one who crosses the tape in the shortest time is the winner, end of story. Yet it seems that the company had promised a select group of runners that the winner would only be selected from their numbers. The company did attempt a lame pedal-and-fill response, saying that it “recognizes Arien O’Connell as a winner” – though not the winner.

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Last week we asked BNET readers to share their ethical lapses and what they learned them. To our surprise, several folks were offended by the very nature of the question, as if we thought ethical lapses were something to be glorified. Writes jwood:

What were you thinking? Having your readers gloat over their unethical exploits? And then select the “best?”

Not at all. In fact, we’re going ask you to rate each of the lapses, asking whether it was “understandable and forgivable,” “at the line,” or “unforgivable.” Here goes.

namfus writes:

Six years ago, I basically allowed my boss to manipulate my performance review and the HR department in order to sack me.

This ethical lapse is...

• understandable and forgivable
• at the line
• unforgivable

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martikirchmer writes:

Some years ago, in the interest of protecting my employees, I was aggressive about reporting my boss every time he bullied my co-workers or staff. He was indeed a bully — everyone agreed (including HR and his boss) but in trying to bring the problem to a head, my actions were not particularly admirable. The story ends with me (voluntarily) leaving. He is still there.

This ethical lapse is...

• understandable and forgivable
• at the line
• unforgivable

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kschroth writes

Our department head (and my boss) was a super slacker. We conducted a cue and eventually after gathering much evidence against him, made a call to the CEO of the company who was out of state. As stated above this was not received well. We were thought of as deserters. In the end, he got sacked, I moved up, managed the department for awhile before the whole company fell in.

Not sure what I DID learn, but I know that wasn’t the right way to handle it, even though it seemed so at the time. Bummer, but in corporate America it is essential to CYA whether a manager or a peon. Someone usually has something brewing. I have since moved to a smaller organization and LOVE IT!!

This ethical lapse is...

• understandable and forgivable
• at the line
• unforgivable

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And I’m not squeaky clean, either. Here’s mine:

A long, long time ago I was employed at a fashionable retail shop. I got along well with the manager, but one day found out he had been deceptive with the absentee owners — he had a number of times closed the store a couple hours early so that he could see a movie…

The ethical response would have been to call the owner and tell him. But I didn’t want to seem like “a rat.” A few months later, we had a bit of a falling out over a questionable firing. At that point I saw an opportunity for advancement and called the owner and told him about the manager’s movie-going antics, leaving a message.

It all backfired, of course. For starters, I immediately felt awful about being a rat. Then, as it turned out, the owner had already got wind of the manager’s transgression and given him a proper dressing down but forgave him because he was an otherwise competent manager and a terrific sales person. In fact, the owner saw through my little game and almost fired me for my “disloyalty” to my manager. Hard feelings; damaged relations all around.

Lesson learned: It always comes back to bite you.

This ethical lapse is...

• understandable and forgivable
• at the line
• unforgivable

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Lastly, CanadianBusine offers up a current events scenario:

We needn’t look far to ferret out some lessons. Here are two examples:

$23 billion of American taxpayer money lost, stolen or improperly accounted for in Iraq. Complete and utter disregard for the most basic procurement and supply chain management guidelines and then punishment of those who seek to bring this to light.

Sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Plenty of blame being leveled at the government for telling the banks to offer loans to squishy buyers. However, no one forced any bank to violate basic mortgage lending guidelines and then make millions in bonuses from selling this junk paper to equally short-sighted institutional investors.

This ethical lapse is...

• understandable and forgivable
• at the line
• unforgivable

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Is your ethics training effective?

That’s the question that my confrere, Lauren Bloom, an ethics trainer and the author of the eponymous blog, “Lauren Bloom’s Blog,” asks. She says:

In the wake of the subprime mortgage mess, a lot of companies will probably decide that it’s time to offer ethics training to their employees. Here’s hoping that they do it well, and for the right reasons. It’s extremely important to train employees in business ethics, but the training has to be effective if it’s going to be worth the time and trouble invested in it. Effective ethics training is interactive, specific to the ethical issues that are most relevant to the company, understandable and positive, and yields measurable results.

One wonders, though, just how the effectiveness of a company’s ethics training can be quantifiably measured. (If you have a clue, please share it with your fellow BNETers in the comments.)

In my professional, corporate career, I’ve been through a few “ethics courses” but these were mostly taken online and included rather simplistic, multiple choice questions with common sense answers.

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Have an ethics training horror story? Share it.

American business has long had a bad habit of lavishly rewarding executive failure, and “the government” has often been accused of “meddling” in the affairs of business to the detriment of the national economy.

But Tuesday Uncle Sam stepped in opened up a can of righteous whup-ass in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debacle (don’t call it FannieGate), with the Federal Housing Finance Agency notifying former Fannie CEO, Daniel Mudd, and former Freddie CEO, Richard Syron, that they would not be receiving the approximately $24 million in “golden parachute” payments called for in their contracts. Syron would have gotten between $12 million and $14 million in exit pay; Mudd, $7 million to $9 million.

Whether the feds can manage Fannie and Freddie out of their current crises remains to be seen, although at this point it’s hard to imagine it screwing the pooch worse than Syron and Mudd.

No matter. The question is, should private enterprise follow the government’s lead and amend their executive contracts to include a “failure clause” that would nullify or reduce exit payouts if the exec fails meet a set of stated goals?

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Watch the AMC series “Mad Men,” and you’d think that workplace boozing was key to productivity.

Well, the three-martini lunch may be a thing of the past, but boozing and work still go hand-in-hand in many office cultures. From the company holiday party, to the monthly beer-bash, to the stressed-out employee sneaking a quick one at the pub down the street, hooch has a way of wending its way into workplace life.

But even cheap booze isn’t always all that cheap. In fact, alcohol use and abuse can come with a pretty hefty price tag. According to a new study by the Marin Institute, alcohol costs more than $25 billion a year in lost
productivity – in California alone.

Also according to the study, the yearly revenue generated by alcoholic beverages in the state is nearly $23 billion. And, while the state takes in about 8 cents in taxes on every drink consumed, that same drink costs the state $2.80.

But what to do about it? We tried prohibition. That didn’t turn out so well, and lead to a wave of industrial strength organized crime and violence. The Marin Institute recommends, among other measures, more funding for counties and cities to “prevent alcohol harm,” reducing the influence of the “alcohol industry lobbying,” and, of course, raising taxes in tippling.

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For more on dealing with office boozing, consult the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s “Alcoholism in The Workplace: A Handbook for Supervisors.”

(Image courtesy AMC TV.)

Come on, fess up. Is all of that software on your home computer legal (as in, you purchased it instead of copying the version your foolish friend just bought)? Apparently it’s not just you.

According to the 2007 State Piracy Study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), last year one in five pieces of software in use on American PCs was unlicensed and illegal. Not a big deal, you say? The BSA begs to differ. It estimates that the tech industry lost more than $15 billion in revenue from software piracy in eight states - enough to pay for the salaries of 54,000 high tech workers.

If that figure isn’t reason enough to forgo pirated software, Clint Korver over at ethics for the real world, offers another rationale. He says ethical habits start with small things - even such things as software:

Software piracy is to theft what white lies are to lies. In both cases it is all too easy for people to tell themselves a story about how it doesn’t fully count somehow. Everyone else is doing it. No one will know. Or a myriad of other rationalizations.

Sure, this is the kind of thinking that goes into small decisions, like telling your friend those pants don’t look so bad on her. But deciding to steal - even when it’s “just” bits and bytes like Microsoft Office - isn’t so small.

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Oil companies like to boast that their record-breaking profits are largely invested in infrastructure, exploration for new sources of “Texas tea,” and in exploring “green alternatives.”

But, according to an AP story, the bulk of oil companies’ earnings have gone not into exploration, but to stock buybacks and shareholder dividends. “In the first three months of this year,” wrote the piece’s author, John Poretto, “Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s biggest publicly traded oil company, shelled out $8.8 billion on stock buybacks alone, compared with $5.5 billion on exploration and other capital projects… The company expects to spend up to $30 billion on capital and exploration projects in each of the next five years. Last year, it spent about $32 billion on share buybacks.”

So what? Stock buybacks are common in U.S. business, a means of shrinking the available pool of stock and increasing shareholder value. And an oil company is a business just like any other, one whose primary responsibility is maximize profits and increase value for shareholders, right?

Well, yes. But selling oil isn’t exactly the same as, say, pushing Right Guard or Twinkies. Oil is the world’s primary source of energy and as such fuels the economies of just about every corner of the globe not still dependent on donkey carts. The price of oil affects the price of everything, from the fuel you buy at the pump to the Right Guard you sprayed under your arms this morning and the Twinkie you snuck at lunch. It is the fundamental engine of our wealth.

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Way back in 1984, an insurance salesman was awarded $1.9 million by a Texas court in a defamation suit because his employer, Frank B. Hall and Company, was asked for a reference and, perhaps too candidly, rated the salesman “a zero.”

Thus began the era of reference fear; many companies will now only confirm the dates of employment. While the law, at least in theory, protects truthful references, the unwritten rule is that if you’re going to give a reference, it must be a good one for fear of a big-bucks lawsuit.

The catch here is that some see it as harmless to give a good reference to a bad employee because all you’re doing is unloading your problem on someone else (possibly even a competitor). But is this ethical?

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The student loan business is going through a credit crisis, and some of the nation’s largest lenders are responding with a new business model that may be sound business but is ethically questionable.

Students at the top-tier schools are being taken care of, but those at the lower-rung — community colleges, and other less-competitive institutions — are being dissed in the lending game, whether by being dropped by lenders or being forced to take packages that are far-less appealing than their ivory tower peers.

The thinking is simple: the better the school, the more money that student is likely to make in the long-term, which means you’ll get a more solid return on the loan. But what about the ethics here? Are these large lenders discriminating against a large economic chunk of the population? I think so, because the nation’s neediest students are the ones most likely to be hurt. Community college may not be a stepping stone for the corner office, but it is an invaluable stepping stone to a better job and a better life for the less fortunate.

The tag line for this blog is “right and wrong in a for-profit world.” This is exactly that kind of dilemma. What’s right for profit may not be ethically sound. So, are these large lenders in the wrong here?

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