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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...

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...

Interim Government: Pakistan Inspires

About 18 months ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2012 I had the good fortune to walk out of a lunch meeting on global health issues with Dr. Sania Nishtar, most recently Caretaker Federal Minister in Pakistan’s interim government and Founder of the internationally renowned health NGO Heartfile. My admiration for her at the time pales in comparison to what I have had the privilege of witnessing these past two months.  (more…)

Untangling the Confusion Over Organizational Ethics

This article was first published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Summer 2013).  A wave of ethics transgressions underlines the importance of comprehensive ethics oversight for organizational success. Last year, 2012, was in many regards a step forward for proponents of ethical action. Roger Gifford, the Lord Mayor of the City of London, one of the world’s financial capitals, declared business ethics a priority and critical to the City’s economic success. François Hollande published a Code of Ethics within 11 days of becoming president of France. And the new Chinese premier, Xi Jinping, highlighted the ongoing danger of corruption to economic and social development as a central part...

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