Month: January 2006

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

Yesterday, ExxonMobil announced its 2005 profits–the largest of any corporate entity in any year in history.

$36.13 billion, of which $23.2 billion was distributed to shareholders (up $8.3 billion over last year’s distribution.

The company obviously feels embarrassed by its riches. The press release, linked above, is full of all sorts of justifications and rationalizations.

The simple truth is that this is simply an obscene amount of money, and ExxonMobil should be embarrassed!

Especially since this was the year where gas prices shot up by over 30 percent for a while, before settling down. Especially considering the impact in the Gulf of Mexico of environmental damage wreaked by hurricanes going through the offshore oil rigs. Especially considering the wretched fate of New Orleans’ poor. Even Wal-Mart, not exactly a paragon of corporate virtue, managed to dedicate significant resources to the relief effort. But for ExxonMobil, it’s just another chance to line the pockets of its shareholders.

While no oil companies have totally clean hands, I will continue to buy from more responsible companies like Citgo and BP whenever possible.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

Let’s see…if I’m not mistaken, it is now 2006. If I recall correctly, we are talking about an indictment that was handed down in 2004, for crimes allegedly committed in 2001 and earlier.

You’ve got to wonder–would it have taken so long to come to trial if Ken Lay hadn’t had so many “friends in high places?”

Oh, and I think a fair punishment for Lay and his ilk would be some jail time and then strip him of all assets, use them to at least partially reimburse the innocent Enron employees who watched their retirement nest eggs go up in smoke, make him get a job in a factory somewhere, pay him minimum wage, and let him see if he could support himself in the style to which he’s accustomed. Oh yes, with community service in the form of unpaid presentations to b-school kids on how he “done us wrong” and what the human consequences were. It might be rather educational, don’t you think. And cheaper for us taxpayers than throwing away the key.

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By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics

I’ve been quietly following the James Frey flap for a couple of weeks now. This is the guy who got Oprah’s endorsement for his “memoir” of addiction, jail time, and so forth (I will not make it easier to locate by naming the book here)–only it turned out to be fiction.

When this was revealed, Oprah first defended him for creating a gripping read that addressed deep issues, etc. The other day, she snapped out of the trance and tore him apart on camera.

Meanwhile, the author claims he originally submitted it as fiction, the publisher–no tiny little outfit but Doubleday, one of the biggest in the nation–first called in creative nonfiction and when that didn’t fly, said that Frey had hoodwinked them.

It would be very illuminating to see Frey’s original book proposal and see where the truth lies. Meanwhile, the thing stinks.

Best commentary I’ve seen on it is from Pat Holt of Holt Uncensored–she is always worth reading.

As of this writing, she hasn’t archived the column yet, but she has some great suggestions:

  • Offer a refund for any reader who wants one, and make that process very easy
  • Hire website muckrakers like smokinggun.com to vet any book that claims to be nonfiction
  • Get Frey to rewrite the book and send him out on tour to flog the vastly different rewrite, which would be priced at half of the original
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    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics

    We’ve all shared a laugh as improbable images cloned together in Photoshop make their way across the Internet. The problem is that image manipulation can be used very unethically–to fudge scientific results, for example

    A Boston Globe story documents how editorial staff at the Journal of Cell Biology is running all submitted photos through Photoshop to detect fraud. (The New York Times ran a rather clearer article, but it requires paid access.)

    And they’ve discovered fraud is rampant enough that they’ve had to yank 14 accepted papers. In some cases, they’re even notifying the institutions sponsoring the research to check into the accuracy of the researchers’ findings.

    After the scandal with Hwang Woo Suk and his faked stem cells, such caution is unfortunately necessary. And form a science point of view, I find it fascinating that Photoshop can not only alter images, but tell you if an image is already altered.

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    By Posted on Posted in Other

    A bit off-track for this blog, but this has to be shared: these pictures of elephants, eagles, whales, etc seem so human, and the organizers claim they’re unretouched. Those in southern California may want to seek out the exhibit in Santa Monica.

    I pass on the post from my good friend Nenah Sylver:

    Subject: Ashes and Snow – extraordinary California photography exhibit on the
    web

    This is what I’ve been told:

    In the Ashes and Snow exhibit, there is no digital layering. All the images are as the photographer saw them and have not been digitally enhanced. All of the animals are wild and people friendly.

    The new exhibit will be shown at the Santa Monica Pier mid January through May. Many of the actual photographs are about
    5 feet by 8 feet in size.

    You can see them on the web here:
    https://www.ashesandsnow.org

    Follow these directions: click on “Portfolio” and then double click on the image. To see more images, keep double clicking, and the images will change.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    This from a financial currency exchange newswire:

    A corporate scandal involving Livedoor, a Japanese high tech company caused such a big drop in the stock market that trading had to halt on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

    People get hurt when other people cheat. Ethics crimes are not victimless. Just ask those poor Enron employees who saw their retirement funds go up in smoke as the company stock turned worthless.

    Run your company the right way… Sign the Ethics Pledge so you can brag about it. And build a company that grows itself and the economy instead of shooting it in the foot.

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    By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Other

    I went to a bookstore the other day and noticed two books prominently displayed on the same front table:

    Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, by none other than former President Jimmy Carter, and a Beacon Press anthology, Global Values 101, featuring such well-known progressive thinkers as Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman, Robert Reich, and Lani Guinier, among many others.

    For more than two decades, the ultra-right has staked a claim around “values.” Unfortunately, the values they claim are not my values or the values of most people I know. Just as one example among many, the term “family values” has been far too often used to create a climate of acute homophobia–of bigotry. These people claim they’re in favor of family values, but their definition of family only includes one among various possible models: a dominant husband, a stay-home wife (or one focused far more on home than career, if she does work outside the home), and zero tolerance for divergence from the model.

    Well, I see a whole lot of families that don’t look like that, but that are loving, secure places for the partners and their children. And I see plenty that do fit the “traditional family values” model where abuse, infidelity, and/or alcoholism seem to rule the day.

    Let me be clear: there are, of course, plenty of loving, supportive families with a husband and wife in a heterosexual marriage; I am blessed to live in one. But our family is founded on tolerance, on freedom of self-exploration, and on the firm value of making the world a better place than we found it by helping to break down barriers of bigotry.

    So I find it very refreshing, as the author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, a book with a strong values message within a progressive context, to see major publishing houses beginning to publish books like these.

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    By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News

    ​​​​I have a lot of respect for media coach/PR queen Susan Harrow,
    author of one of my favorite PR books (Sell Yourself Without Selling
    Your Soul) and the go-to person if you want your author on Oprah. I’ve
    subscribed to her newsletter for years and it’s one I actually do read.

    Susan’s launched a new project: celebrity makeovers by nomination (e.g., these are not really her clients). She starts with advice to Malcolm Gladwell.
    I’ve read Blink and a chunk of The Tipping Point but have not heard him
    speak. I think I have heard him on radio but it didn’t leave much
    impression.

    Susan goes after him to improve his speaking
    delivery in a big way, and all the points she makes sound valid.
    Speaking is a vital communication tool for authors. But she also tells
    him to shave his hair. Looking at his picture on her blog, I think it’s
    kind of cute. I’d vote for a little trim maybe, but not a radical new
    look.

    But I sure do hope we haven’t reached the point on the
    glitz-scale where someone with as important a message as Gladwell is
    judged on his or her hairstyle!

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Shel's Personal Life

    Nice remark from another copywriter colelague, Mordechai “Morty” Schiler, in his blog:

    While I’m still grappling with integrating marketing and principles, Shel Horowitz has made a career of balancing the two.

    I’m hoping his “grappling” will lead him to sign the Business Ethics Pledge; I know from past interaction that he’s a highly ethical person, just too humble to take credit for that position.

    And how about you?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

    The New York Times reports that China
    pressured Microsoft to take down a blog that mentioned a journalist
    strike at a Chinese paper following the firing of a journalist    . The blog was hosted on a server in the U.S.

    Mr.
    Zhao said in an interview Thursday that Microsoft chose to delete his
    blog on Dec. 30 with no warning. “I didn’t even say I supported the
    strike,” he said. “This action by Microsoft infringed upon my freedom
    of speech. They even deleted my blog and gave me no chance to back up
    my files without any warning.”

    Tacky, to be sure.
    But some bloggers speculate this could lead to much worse: Gridskipper
    claims the Chinese threatened to convert the whole country to Linux and
    Movable Type, e.g., non-Microsoft. That site won’t let me copy and
    quote, but here’s the link.

    And
    I’ve just spent ten minutes trying unsuccessfully to locate the comment
    I saw that wondered if MS would be equally cowardly in the face of
    illegal requests from our own US government–which, considering all the
    stuff coming out about illegal White House-authorized spying, etc., is
    not such a big leap.

    One of Microsoft’s own most public bloggers, Scobleizer, the “Microsoft Geek Blogger”, had this to say:

    OK,
    this one is depressing to me. It’s one thing to pull a list of words
    out of blogs using an algorithm. It’s another thing to become an agent
    of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work. Yes, I know the
    consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of
    dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right.

    He
    goes on to talk about moral courage, his grandmother who stood up to
    the Nazis in Germany, and his own action contacting higher-ups at
    Microsoft about this issue. Good for him!

    Meanwhile, a message to all bloggers, and all who rely on any outside hosting for your data: Keep backups on your own system!

    I maintain this blog on two different servers–but maybe I should keep a file on my hard drive, as well.

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