business ethics
Should CEO disclose DUI?
If a CEO gets dinged for driving under the influence, should a company have to disclose it?Answer and discussion here: Herb Greenberg: I Got it Wrong: US Airways Should've Disclosed CEO's DUI
Richard Brisebois
Odds and Ends
How Americans pay
[N]ear the top of the public's list of regular expenses are cable or satellite television service (78% of adults say they pay such bills every month); cell phone service (74%) and internet connections (65%). These information age staples either didn't exist or were in their
International and Cross-cultural
Nobel Prize: Money not the whole story
When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, Yunus said that Grameen Bank had lent nearly $6 billion over the last 30 years in loans that average $130 each. A key stipulation of the program is that its loans must be for income-producing activities, not consumption. But,
management
Landing in a business or college near you: helicopter parents
[A] survey last year of 400 respondents by the career Web site Experience Inc. found that 25 percent said that their parents were involved in their jobs “to the point that it was either annoying or embarrassing.” (...)“Employers are having a nightmare with this,” says Stephen Seaward, director of career
board of directors
Awakening the directors within
With the ouster of Home Depot's Bob Nardelli and his resultant compensation package that was valued at about $210 million and Pfizer's Henry A. McKinnell's which came to almost $200 million, it has brought the spotlight on excessive compensation packages for CEO's.
English language
Plain English is quite an achievement
You achieve plain English when you use the simplest, most straightforward way of expressing an idea. You can still choose interesting words. But you'll avoid fancy ones that have everyday replacements meaning precisely the same thing. - Bryan Garner on "Plain English" And you will find several
Elevator speech
A librarian's elevator pitch
"If information is a jungle, the internet would be the tourist guidebook written by a person who has never been there. A librarian would be the guide who has lived there all his/her life. Sure, the guide book would give you some interesting possible facts about the jungle,
Corporate crime
Corporate Hall of Shame 2-12-07
Brownell is the third high-level official of D.C.-based Douglas Development who has been found guilty of felony charges. (...) Between 1996 and 2004 Douglas Development made payments totaling more than $270,000 to a credit line account of Brownell at Potomac Valley Bank, where the funds were then
Teaching and Learning
How to educate without teaching
Effective educators do not teach. Teaching is usually an obstruction to learning. (...) However, a good educator facilitates one’s learning process, enables one to learn more rapidly and effectively and motivates one to do so. To a large extent they do so by making learning fun.- Russell Ackoff (CQM Journal)
Teaching and Learning
Ackoff on educators and management gurus
The appeal of gurus lies to a large extent in the simplicity of the doctrines they put forth. They are simple no matter how complex the problems at which they are directed. They provide a life raft to those managers who are incapable of handling complexity. (...) Educators stand in sharp
business ethics
Cruise execs flying high while stock nosedives
[T]he company disclosed that Chairman and CEO Micky Arison rang up $343K on his use of the corporate jet last year and that COO Howard Frank spent $321K. Of course, anyone looking to see how those numbers compare to the previous year have to dig through another set of
Bank fraud
The fraud never stops
A federal judge in Topeka sentenced former Westar Energy CEO David Wittig to 24 months in prison for bank fraud (Houston Chronicle via Business Week)