Duncan Tait’s evidence to the Horizon Post Office inquiry tells a sadly all-too familiar corporate tale.  Tait was the Managing Director and then Chief Executive of the Fujitsu business in the UK that developed, sold and serviced the infamous Horizon accounting system to the UK Post Office.  For anyone who has not been following the…

Each spring I enjoy leading Masters in Finance students through a business case I developed that covers real-world topics on Governance, Ethics and whistleblowing.  This year, I wished we had waited another month. Just yesterday, New York Community Bancorp, Inc. (NYCB) filed its Annual Report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission revealing a material…

The Wall Street Journal reported on April 27 that ‘the discovery of private messages in which Mr [Tucker] Carlson showed a disregard for management and colleagues was a major factor [in the decision to fire him].’  Other outlets including Forbes and Rolling Stone have reported the existence of a ‘secret dossier’ that FOX News allegedly…

Watching the BBC dive into crisis over Gary Lineker’s tweet about the UK Government’s immigration policy underlined the importance of consequence management – a topic in two post-grad classes I’ve been teaching recently. For those not familiar with the players, Gary Lineker is a football (soccer) pundit in England, the BBC’s highest-paid contractor and pretty…

At a recent C-Suite forum I was asked whether I believed that employees should be given second chances when it comes to ethical issues.  I like this type of question because it challenges organizations to think more deeply about the issue.  Of course, the simple – or perhaps the lazy – answer would be ‘yes,…

There is so much to unpack from Sam Bankman Fried’s compelling – and shocking – video interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the NYT/Deal Book Summit. For starters, though, some basics about Compliance. When asked to comment on what appears to have been an unsupervised, out of control environment (“like a bunch of kids on…