Tag: James Pilant

Is Teaching Business Ethics a Waste of Time?

On By southwerkIn Teaching1 Comment
English: , Prussian philosopher. Português: , ...

English: , Prussian philosopher. Português: , filósofo alemão. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Business school and ethics: Can we train MBAs to do the right thing? – Slate Magazine

The only way we’ll get our students to integrate their moral compasses with the practical tools of business we teach them is to incorporate the topic of ethics throughout the curriculum. This will require the accounting and finance and marketing professors to grasp the ethical blind spots inherent in their respective areas, and to appreciate and recognize approaches to lessening them. Professors, in other words, need to be moral architects themselves.

When you stop and ask students whether they’d like their dying words to be “I maximized profits,” a wave of laughter ripples through the class, as all but the most callous have higher aspirations for themselves. When we ask MBA students why they might want to be a CEO, the first two responses are “I want to make a difference” and “I enjoy a challenge”; “Making gobs of money” always comes in third. We need to work harder to equip students to live up to those aspirations. And if we’re not going to make a better-faith effort in this endeavor, perhaps we should remove discussion of ethics from business schools altogether. Otherwise, it serves merely as empty PR for MBA programs and to appease the consciences of those who teach in them.

Business school and ethics: Can we train MBAs to do the right thing? – Slate Magazine

Maybe, but I don’t think so. I do think the way like the article says that the way business ethics is taught now is a failure and a disaster. The article recommends embedding ethics in every part of the business curriculum. That would be nice, but it is neither necessary or likely that will happen.

I recommend that business ethics be taught the way I do it. (I know, everybody does – however, hear me out.) I believe in giving business students the opportunity to develop their own moral landscape. I use moral problems, big ones, airline crashes, economic disasters, fires, murders, etc., as examples. Then I ask students the big questions: Who’s responsible and what should be done? They decide within a set of guidelines. I tell them that for every big open ended question, that there are usually around five or so really good answers, eleven to fifteen mediocre answers and an infinity of bad inadequate poorly thought out answers. I tell them to look for the five.

By providing the students with broad guidelines and by refusing to tell them the “right” answers, I engage their judgment. They write brief essays justifying their choices, and then we do it again and again. By the end of the semester, they have created a moral framework, that I hope lasts for their lifetimes certainly for many years. My perception is that self education, self creations in a real sense is the most effective means of education.

James Pilant

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Are Lion Burgers in Poor Taste?

On By southwerkIn News2 Comments

Sometimes something happens that catches your attention. This is it.

I laughed when I first heard this. Why the fuss, I thought, calling a fancy burger, a lion burger is hardly crime. Then I read the article. The burgers are 80% lion meat. I didn’t know you could get it. I can’t figure out why you would want to get it.

So, my second thought was, well maybe, a lion killed his sister and this is revenge. Not a good reason to eat lion, but better than nothing. Nope, no family losses to lions. What does that leave? Is he allergic to cats?

This is just a bad idea. Get a regular burger, call it a lion kill burger, a lion victory over some beefy animal. We have lots of beefy animals and very few lions.

I suppose we should ask at some point – is it ethical to eat lion meat or to sell it? If you believe that meat eating is okay, eating lion is probably okay save from an aesthetic point of view. Currently the lion is not an endangered species although I have confidence that human greed and incompetence will eventually get it there.

James Pilant

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There Were a Lot of Reasons to Move the Web Site.

On By southwerkIn business ethics3 Comments

Probably some of you are thinking why has James moved? He’s going to lose his subscriptions, his Google ranking and part of his audience is going to be unable to adapt and move on to other blogs. I might add that the weakening entries of the last few weeks while the change is underway also undercuts traffic and causes me deep concern.

But the new blog offers multiple categories on the front page and incredible flexibility on how each of those categories appear. The pages in many cases program themselves. For instance, the archives page doesn’t send you to the last few pages – it gives you an entire page of post titles

You can incorporate RSS feeds into page categories. I have already successfully done this. Essentially this means that I can feature other blogs with their most up-to-date posts. It lets me set the number of the posts up to ten and provided a description of each automatically. It updates itself every ten minutes.

When you post, the blog automatically brings up public domain pictures to use, web sites on the same subject to link to and recommends the best search terms to attach. That’s nice – extremely convenient. When a post is up and it’s clicked on, at the bottom of the post three other related posts in the blog are listed.

I want to put up the best blogs in this subject, everyone from buddies like the Ethics Sage, to the great stalwarts in the business ethics field like Chris MacDonald’s Business Ethics Blog as well as Lauren Bloom’s blog on business ethics. But I want to be cautious, other bloggers may want to limit their presence on someone else’s blog, so I’m going to prepare a presentation showing the possibilities and put it out to people I would like to feature.

Currently the new blog site looks like this. It’s kind of a mess. I don’t have a proper RSS feed for it. I am having trouble organizing some of the sections. My search engine optimization is only partly done.

Nevertheless, I am gradually working my way through all of the training film and helpful advice from the web. I have confidence that I can make it work. It’s quite an advance and I want something more. I want more people to read the blog and through it, learn of the other important blog in the business ethics world.

James Pilant

We’re getting to crunch time on moving the blog!

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I just finished the book, Blogging All in One for Dummies. I got it on Monday and finished it tonight. It answered most of the questions I had about moving the blog. So, I will go ahead. Tomorrow, I will buy the new domain name and once I receive it, I will buy an online service to host my blog for a year in advance.  Once this is done, I will buy the theme I have picked out and I have decided to pay a little extra (thirty dollars) and have them set up the principal elements of the web site for me.

I’d like the prototype up and running by Saturday morning, so I can begin setting it up.

I’m still on schedule for a September 1st start.

James Pilant

Dan Bodine Comments on My Last Post

On By southwerkIn business ethics2 Comments

Dan Bodine was kind enough to comment on my travails at moving to a new site. Here’s what he has to say –

Little confused over the “mechanics” of this and why you’re worried so much. Really enjoy you’re content, by the way. But I’m in the early design stage of doing something similar. Only instead of moving my blog, I’m continuing it and starting a new blog. The new blog will be just or political comment, which I feel is inappropriate for my present news and features blog. And of course that means moving some of my old stories and re-posting them in the new blog’s morgue. Is what you’re doing radically different than this? And I’m just an old fogey who still ain’t gotta clue as to how all these website really works?

I’m building a site with at least two sliders, a video feed and about three news feed with probably a half dozen RSS feeds from individual blogs I find important. I’m reading and watching videos from You-Tube on blogging. I’m fifty-five and this stuff does not come as easy as it does to the young.

I’ve been blogging off and on for the past three or four years. This new blog will encapsulate all the lessons I’ve learned in that time.

This is going to be combination of good content, powerful imaging, video content and heavy, heavy search engine optimization.

James Pilant

There Will Be Fewer Posts Until September First.

On By southwerkIn business ethics5 Comments

I will probably post no more than once a day until the day the web site moves to its new site on September 1st. The move requires continuous research and planning. Sometimes, I wonder if I have enough time to get all this done.

James Pilant

Fiduciary Duty and Investment Brokers (via Pilant’s Business Ethics Blog)

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

A re-post of one of my essays from last year.

James Pilant

Fiduciary Duty and Investment Brokers “When I was growing up in the shadow of the Edgar Thomson Works of U.S. Steel a half century ago, it was easy to tell the bookies from the bankers — and it wasn’t just by the clothes they were wearing. If you wanted to place a bet, you went to a bookie; if you wanted to invest, you went to a banker or stock broker.” This is the lead paragraph from Tom Michlovic’s opinion piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It’s a dead on call. The Wall Street … Read More

via Pilant’s Business Ethics Blog

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On By southwerkIn business ethics

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James Pilant

James Pilant

G R Putland comments on the post – “War on drugs” is a failure in many ways (via Eideard)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

G.R. Putland comments on an earlier post of mine.

Submitted on 2011/06/22 at 2:52 am

The reversal of the presumption of innocence in drug-possession cases is incompatible with the rule of law and is therefore unconstitutional in ALL jurisdictions. Moreover, the ECONOMICS of the drug trade dictate that criminal sanctions are self-defeating unless concentrated on RETAIL SALES.

See “The universally unconstitutional war on drugs”: http://is.gd/ccxry6 .

Morally Right and Just

On By southwerkIn ethics, Government Failure

(A republish of an old column.)

“What is morally just and right – that’s not my job,” he said.

If a rapist, a murderer, an embezzler, any kind of criminal, had said this, we wouldn’t be surprised. If a corporate CEO said it here in the age of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, I would not be particularly surprised but to hear it from the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court is a tragedy and an abomination.

Every human being and, in particular, every American has a responsibility to do what is right and hold others to moral responsibility. That is even more critical in the field of law where what must be a primary concern is justice.

What is particularly bizarre is that he spoke these words in a speech where he repeatedly praised President Lincoln. He said this:

Like most attorneys of his day, Lincoln didn’t go to law school and learned it by reading and working for other lawyers, Roberts said. He was a generalist who studied many things and was continually learning. He understood human nature and had a strong internal compass that allowed him to excel when he believed he was right.

What did President Lincoln say about morality? This is from the his Second Inauguration.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Let us as Americans, as believers in one religion or another, as believers in any philosophy in which good is considered more important than evil, struggle to make this land a better place. Let us always remember that we have an affirmative duty to fight evil and a responsibility to do what is right and honor justice whether we are the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or a simple citizen of a great nation.

James Pilant