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The Biggest Unrecognized Ethics Risk

Every year I challenge students in my Stanford University Ethics on the Edge class to find new examples of drivers of ethics transgressions. Every year they do. A few years ago it was anonymous social media. The latest: the sharing economy. Is Uber spreading unethical employee practices and unsafe passenger experiences by categorizing drivers as independent contractors and defending sub-par safety checks? Or is Uber really “just a platform” and therefore justified in dumping responsibility for ethics on the technology, the users, the drivers, and society? (more…)

Ethics Priorities for 2017: Banish the Binary

2016 was a year of landmark ethics challenges. The year closed with an unprecedented Presidential-scale conflicts of interest quagmire and alleged cyber interference with the US election. Along the way, landmark “in or out” binary decisions such as Brexit left divisiveness, uncertainty, and waste in their wake. Looking forward to in 2017, we should focus on one element of ethical decision-making: banishing the binary. (more…)

Ethics Priorities for 2017: Banish the Binary

2016 was a year of landmark ethics challenges. The year closed with an unprecedented Presidential-scale conflicts of interest quagmire and alleged cyber interference with the US election. Along the way, landmark “in or out” binary decisions such as Brexit left divisiveness, uncertainty, and waste in their wake. Looking forward to in 2017, we should focus on one element of ethical decision-making: banishing the binary. The persistent interpretation of ethical dilemmas as black and white does not generate ethical solutions to today’s technologically and politically complex problems. We should reframe “either or” and “yes or no” and “in or out” decisions to...

HOW DO SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES PREPARE STUDENTS TO MEET FUTURE BUSINESS NEEDS?

This article was first published by the French Chamber of Great Britain (link) That was the question posed by Philippe Chalon, Chair of the Chamber’s Economic Updates, to Peter Todd, Dean of HEC Paris and Susan Liautaud, Vice Chair of Council and Court of Governors of the London School of Economics & Political Science on the premise that education is key for the competitiveness of nations (more…)

Mining Ethics Lessons from Leadership Research… and Miners

Iterative Ethics This blog is the first of a series of eight blogs I will write extracting ethics lessons from research and stories that are not at the start ethics-related. It is part of a deliberate effort at synthetic organizational thinking at SLAL, tying together cross-sector organizational matters to derive learning directly and indirectly relevant to ethics. The messages are gleaned from business, non-profit, and governmental organizations, and the ethics applies to all. In a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “Leadership Lessons from the Chilean Mining Rescue,” Harvard Business School professors Amy C. Edmondson and Herman B. Leonard, and...

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