Ethikos Editor’s Weekly Picks: The Ethical Aspects of Business Education Can We Train MBAs to do the Right Thing?

By Vinay Dutta for Financial Express
The question is whether present-day business schools are manufacturing managers programmed to make better business decisions or are they trained to view their decisions from an ethical lens as well? Does the course curriculum of business schools highlight doing right things and cultivating the habit of ethical awareness among students? Ethics act as guideposts to students—the future business managers—to make decisions that make good business sense. Ethics, sometimes known as moral philosophy, is an abstract subject and is filled with grey areas. Different people interpret ethics differently, at times in a manner that suits them. In general, ethics addresses questions such as: How shall we conduct ourselves? What’s right and what’s wrong? How can we measure goodness and badness? Are some things always wrong or does it depend on the view or situation? Read more

By Tracey Lien for the Los Angeles Times
Companies started taking ethics, values and employee engagement more seriously in 2002 after accounting firm Arthur Andersen collapsed because of ethical violations from the Enron scandal, Quinlan said. But it wasn’t until “social media came into its own” that companies realized they couldn’t stop their dirty laundry from going viral online. Read more

By Kalev Leetaru for Forbes
Not a week goes by that my inbox isn’t filled with a small barrage of announcements from publishers, universities, funding agencies and NGOs unveiling the latest open access or open data initiative. It is fantastic to see this newfound enthusiasm for making the final output of the world’s research available for open reading, reuse and replication, but the focus to date has nearly exclusively been on the final outcomes of research, while the initial ethical reviews of just what research should be conducted in the first place remains cloaked in secrecy. Does this mean we should add “open ethics” to our push for “open access” and “open data?” Read more

By Lolly Daskal for Inc.
It may feel as though we’re in a crisis of leadership, but if you stop to look around it’s not hard to find examples of CEOs, middle managers, elected officials, public servants, neighborhood watch organizers, team captains and coaches, teachers and countless others who are doing a good job as leaders. Most of us are either in that group or working toward it.

Much rarer are the exceptional leaders whose qualities truly shine, the ones who practice the kind of leadership we all aspire to. Read more