Brian Scott Gallagher is the Communications Director at Ethical Systems.
How can organizations actualize their employees’ ethical potential? It’s a question Carsten Tams has been tossing around recently. In his time helping companies with organizational design and cultural change, among other things, he’s come to believe that, in the right environment, people are quite capable, even eager, to conform with and uphold ethical norms. Behavioral […]
Early in Managing Business Ethics: Straight Talk About How to Do It Right, I had to wonder whether an anecdote the authors share was apocryphal. It comes in a section of the book’s seventh edition (published in 2017) called “Moving Beyond Cynicism.” It’s not that the authors, Linda Treviño and Katherine Nelson, both professors of […]
Update: The video of our discussion with David Sloan Wilson, Erika Cheung, and Toby Shannon is now available for viewing! Watch it here or below. On a trip to Ottawa, a few years ago, I got to tour the offices of the e-commerce company Shopify, courtesy of a friend of mine I was visiting who […]
Several times in conversation people have asked me whether I mean Thanos, the Marvel villain, when I bring up Theranos. “No,” I say, “I mean Theranos, the tech company once valued at $9 billion before it imploded due to scandal—haven’t you seen the ads for the HBO documentary? They’re everywhere.” I add that Theranos of […]
Well into his 30s, my father ran a pool-plumbing business that just got us by: Sometimes clients wouldn’t pay, and when they did, it wouldn’t be uncommon for checks to bounce. His workers would demand higher wages while he would often have to fix poor work on-site, which would cut into his budget and time. […]
Charles Darwin ended The Origin of Species, his argument for evolution by natural selection, on a note of celebrated eloquence. “There is grandeur to this view of life,” he wrote, “with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according […]
Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden elicited some playful teasing when, early in his presidential campaign, he rather quirkily took to quoting Immanuel Kant, the renowned German philosopher. In various venues, he’d paraphrase what Kant, in one formulation, called his “categorical imperative”—to treat people as ends in themselves, never as a means. On the talk […]
As I was watching The Expanse, a science fiction TV series, I realized that the show demonstrates, perhaps without meaning to, the value of ideological diversity within a team. The story follows the small crew of the Rocinante as they stumble into a solar system-wide conspiracy that threatens a fragile peace among a United Nations-led […]
In an episode of NBC’s sitcom Superstore, Cheyenne, a teenage associate at a Walmart-like retail giant called Cloud-9, goes into labor on the store floor. Coworkers rush for medical supplies as customers spectate out of curiosity and boredom. Cheyanne’s at work so late in her pregnancy because her employer doesn’t offer paid maternity leave—she can’t […]
Earlier this month, at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, I saw something, or someone, that would, on any other day, be out of place: a philosopher. Damon Horowitz—a philosopher at Columbia University who has a history of serial entrepreneurship and was once In-House Philosopher and Director of Engineering at Google—was here to lend […]
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