Ethics

Jun 02, 2023

Generational Stereotypes Poor Predictor

For years defining and pigeon-holing generations has been a cottage industry. Some pundits have pitted generation against generation, including the condescending dismissal expressed by some contemporary young people: “Okay, Boomer.”

Robot and people waiting for an interview

May 12, 2023

The Bots Are Coming! (For Your Job)

Suppose you just graduated from UNI with a degree in marketing. You’ve converted your summer internship into a permanent sales job. Congratulations. A few years into your job, however, you start noticing prospectuses regarding robots.

Mar 03, 2023

Electric Vehicles No Panacea Ethically

Electric vehicles are all the rage. Prospective buyers believe they are helping to reduce carbon emissions; of course, the electricity to manufacture and power the vehicle have to emanate from somewhere, including carbon-based electrical producers.

Feb 12, 2023

"Empty Boxes" of Valentine's Day Candies

I’ve never watched Tom Hanks in the movie Forrest Gump. I have heard his famous line about life resembling a box of chocolates and never knowing what you are going to get. A local television station ran a story exposing the increasing amount of plastic in boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolates.

Nov 18, 2022

Washington NFL Owner Threatens Football-Style "Nuclear Option"

Dan Snyder owns the Washington Commanders (formerly Redskins). The National Football League probably wishes he wasn’t an owner and that he would go “quietly into the night.” Mr. Snyder, however, has no intention of relinquishing his franchise. According to ESPN, Snyder claims to have incriminating evidence on his fellow owners and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

May 26, 2022

What if... We revised the business school curriculum?

I attended Texas Christian University as an undergraduate accounting major in the early to mid 1970s. I then got an MBA and PhD in business-related fields, and began my teaching career in 2000. Now, nearly 50 years later, I am thinking about what we do in our business schools across the USA. Clearly, nothing much has changed in the last half century that would impact business education—sorry, just being a bit sarcastic there! On the contrary, the past 50 years have seen unprecedented change in nearly every aspect of our lives.

Person walking up stairs into the sunlight

May 12, 2022

What if... We got serious about preparing for the future?

As my wife and I contemplate our 68th birthdays, we are increasingly thinking about what we plan to do for our remaining years, and the world we will leave our sons and daughter; even more to the point, what kind of world our 21-month-old grandson will grow up to see. Because I teach strategy and business ethics courses, I naturally relate national and world issues to a business context. As I look at the biggest problems facing us now, two related points stand out to me: 1) Business, writ large, is a (perhaps the) large contributor to those issues, and 2) It is most likely our best chan

Apr 28, 2022

What if... Moral motivation makes you a poor business person?

At some point way back in history, my wife and I were raising three elementary school aged kids. They each participated in the annual “Odyssey of the Mind” competition, designed to promote creativity among students. The central ideology of the program was “If it doesn’t say you can’t, you can.” My wife coached both their teams (I actually know how to do math—two of our kids were on the same team). Seeing the incredible amount of time and effort she put into that, I quickly opted out of coaching, and volunteered to be a judge at the local level on the day of competition.

Apr 18, 2022

What if... We can make something good out of the Russian Ukraine War?

As I write this column, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is more than a month old, with no readily available resolution in sight. Unquestionably, the greatest toll is being felt by Ukrainian residents, who are suffering from incessant shelling, forced migration to safer locales, and death. As many have noted already, this presents the rest of the world with humanitarian and moral crises that we must attend to. I certainly acknowledge these concerns, and wish I had something useful to say about them, but I don’t feel qualified to do that.

Mar 17, 2022

What if... We insist on growth?

I have previously mentioned the idea of “degrowth” in my thoughts about our approach to global climate change and resource depletion. I first ran into this concept in the summer of 2019, when I attended the Alternative Economic and Monetary Systems (AEMS) in Vienna. At that point in my thinking, my opinion was, “Well, of course we have to shrink our impact on the climate and natural resources. That means we all have to do with less.” Easy enough to say for an affluent resident of the global West, who while certainly not rich by US standards, doesn’t miss any meals, either.

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