Attendees were no doubt impressed by both Craig's insight and his ability to elicit reflective and reasoned responses from the audience.
At the beginning of this decade and century, our country witnessed a spate of egregious violations of both our anti-fraud laws and our sense of ethical propriety. The violations were led by a handful of CEOs and CFOs in high-profile public companies. The perpetrators have largely been brought to justice. But it led Congress and the President to respond at the time by passing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and it left many Americans with the nagging question: how could all this have happened, in a country where we take pride in our moral fiber and in our ability to conduct ourselves ethically in business, in diplomacy and on the world stage?
If more of those high-flying CEOs/CFOs back in the early 2000s -- Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow, Bernie Ebbers, Scott Sullivan, Dennis Kozlowski -- had had a stronger sense of ethics in business and in life, we could have avoided the excesses that landed most of them in prison (and, perhaps more relevantly to some of us, we also could have avoided some of the more onerous financial reporting requirements of SOx Section 404, something which has arguably cost our economy many billions of dollars of non-productive spending to implement and enforce).
So what is business ethics all about? Isn't it just about doing the right thing... and isn't that pretty easy?
Anyone who's ever been in a decisionmaking role for any period of time, and anyone who's ever taken a course or even read an article on ethics, knows that the issues are NOT always easy. If they were easy, I guess we wouldn't need SOx, would we?... and our speaker, Craig Barkacs, would be out of a job! ;-)
In just over an hour, Craig will touch on, and get us thinking about, a whole host of issues:
- How business ethics has become a prominent topic in business schools and how the topic of business ethics is addressed
- Knowing v. Doing
- Critical thinking errors
- Justification and Rationalization
- Self-Deception
- Cues and Clues from the Top
- Behavior following incentives
- Moral Modeling and Moral Courage
- Principles & Consequences: Right and Wrong / Good and Bad
- Analytical frameworks involved in business ethics decision-making
- Compliance-based and Integrity-based models
- Loyalty and Integrity
- Stakeholder Analysis
- Standards of Fairness
- Due Process
- Restorative Justice and Humane Second Chances
- Real world examples of the foregoing
- Ethics as a Work in Progress
- An invitation to those present to weigh in on the foregoing with comments, observations, examples or hypothetical situations of their own, and questions.
Speaker
Craig Barkacs J.D., M.B.A.Professor, USD
About Craig Barkacs
Craig earned his B.A. in Philosophy from Kenyon College and a joint J.D./MBA from USD. As an attorney, he often represented the "underdog" in high-profile civil and business litigation cases. As an educator, Craig has designed and taught numerous courses on negotiation, law, ethics, and international business and has published extensively. In addition, he is often sought out by the media to provide commentary on business, legal, ethical, and political issues. Craig and his wife, Linda, are principals in The Barkacs Group, a business consulting firm that provides ethics and negotiation training for the private sector.