Page 146 - Introduction to Business

120 PART 1 The Nature of Contemporary Business

Business Ethics Training
Increasing numbers of companies today are sending their employees to formal
ethics training sessions. Sun Microsystems Corporation of Santa Clara, California,
for example, has been sending thousands of its managers around the world to
intense two-day training programs covering ethical issues ranging from fraud
detection to new accounting practices. While Sun Microsystems has publicized its
ethical guidelines to its executives since the early 1990s and two years ago created
41
a formal business conduct office, the company felt that this was not enough. Inter-
estingly, a number of major corporations are turning to the Internet for ethics train-
ing. Pfizer Corporation, for instance, is offering scores of online ethics courses for
managers, covering topics from ethical decision making to the proper use of e-mail. 42

Business Ethics on Campus
Before its ethical downfall, the Arthur Andersen accounting firm was a generous
benefactor to numerous universities. Indeed, it endowed 40 to 50 professorships to
schools across the country, including the University of Southern California and
Texas A&M University. Similarly, there is an endowed Enron Professorship in Eco-
nomics at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and two dealing with e-commerce
and risk management at Rice University in Enron Corporation’s hometown of
Houston, Texas. Seton Hall University in New Jersey has a lecture hall named for the
scandal-plagued former Tyco Corporation CEO Dennis Koslowski, and a gym
named for the convicted money launderer Robert E. Brennan.
Should universities now take these names off the buildings and professor-
ships? Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, did. Fairfield changed the
name of a computer classroom donated by Arthur Andersen and named the
Andersen Interactive Classroom the Alumni Interactive Classroom after Andersen
was criminally convicted of obstruction of justice charges in the Enron case in
June 2002. In making this move, the dean of the business school (where the
$250,000 classroom was located) said, “[W]e are a Jesuit, Catholic institution and
we take ethics and where we get the money from as seriously as the resources
themselves.” But is it ethical to take a company’s name off something if they’ve
already paid for it? 43 Formulating appropriate ethical standards is not always as
easy as it seems.

reality Do you think you can teach ethics to someone, or is it something that’s
CH ECK an innate part of individuals’ personalities that can’t really be changed?

Careers in Business Governance, Ethics,
and Social Responsibility

A wide and growing range of careers exists in business governance, ethics, and
social responsibility. In the wake of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and similar reforms,
numerous companies have created the position of ethics officer and begun hiring
individuals for these jobs. HCA, one of the nation’s largest owners of hospitals and
surgery centers, has established a company department of ethics, compliance, and
corporate responsibility, headed by a corporate senior vice president. Similarly, Dell
Computer Corporation has designated one of its vice presidents to also serve as the
company’s chief ethics officer. Moreover, virtually all publicly traded companies
have investor relations departments that regularly hire individuals who are daily

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