Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

Bruce Funk was just trying to do his job! The County Clerk of Emery County, Utah for 23 years, Funk was locked out of his office and forced to resign. Why? Because he had the temerity to question whether the Diebold voting machines his county had purchased were accurate, and brought in an outside expert who in fact verified that the machines were highly manipulable and had insufficient backup.

The initial thing that led me to getting a hold of Black Box Voting was that when I re-examined the machine, I found a number of them with insufficient backup memory, some as little as four megabytes, whereas a normal machine had anywhere from 27 to 29 megabytes…

Something was worked out that if they could terminate me as the election official of Emery County, then they would recertify the machines. And so they changed my locks, effective April 1, and locked me out of my office.

This is an outrage! There have been so many election irregularities in both the 2000 and the 2004 elections that there has been a cloud of illegitimacy over the GWB administration from the beginning (a cloud made darker by the consistent misbehavior of this administration once it got into office: a sordid history of vindictive reprisals, lavish favors to friends and special interests, not just a reluctance to hear criticism but constant attacks on those who criticize, and so forth.

And yet when an a election official who has very good reason to be concerned–who knows that the backup memory is inadequate if, for instance, the plug gets knocked out of the wall socket–asks an expert to investigate, he loses his job.

Is this the America that claims to be a beacon of democracy around the world?

Shameful!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

This is too weird: The New York Times went back and forth with senior General Motors executives about a letter to the editor from a GM vice president, attempting to rebut a highly critical article by Thomas Friedman. The letter said accusations in the column were “rubbish”; the Times refused to allow that word in the letter.

Writes the PR guy, Brian Akre,

Now, you’d think it would be relatively easy to get a letter from a GM vice president published in the Times after GM’s reputation was so unfairly questioned. Just a matter of simple journalistic fairness, right?

You’d also think that the newspaper’s editing of letters would be minimal — to fix grammar, remove any profane language, that sort of thing. Not so.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

Speculation about this on the SF Chronicle blog–from a commentator who thinks the Bush administration has done a good job on corporate crime (a premise with which I strongly disagree)–but his lawyer friends who actively cover the trial think it’s a real possibility.

It wouldn’t shock me–I don’t think he’s been that concerned about his legacy, as the rampant cronyism that’s been all over his administration demonstrates.

* * * *
Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books, and the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge to make crooked business as unthinkable in the future as slavery is today.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

The US House of Representatives struck a major blow against our Internet freedom the other day, voting for the so-called Communications, Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006.

This disastrous bill, if also passed by the Senate, would take away the principle of “Net Neutrality”–that every website gets to load as fast as the server can manage and be found as easily as it shows up in the search engines. A vast coalition of 752 groups on both the left and right joined forces to block this bill, but the House passed it 321-101, including 92 Democrats.

Contact your Senators NOW and speak out against this bill–or face a world in which not the government but big telecommunications corporations effectively decide which websites you will see, and promote the sites that pay them the most. The Internet has been the backbone of the independent press, one of the last bastions of people unafraid to tell the real news. We must protect our rights to view these sites, read these blogs, watch these videos–and if content providers have to pay for the privilege of having their sites accessed, that channel will dry up mighty fast. Our browsers will be sold to the highest bidder, and that will not be the alternative voices.

* * * *
Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books, and the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge to make crooked business as unthinkable in the future as slavery is today.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized

Responding to a post by Ed Smith on the Self-Publishing Yahoogroup about whether blogs are worth it:

Hi I am considering putting a blog on my website with the objective of
increasing visitors to my site. I am aware of the costs to set it up,
but I am concerned about the amount of work involved in keeping it
spam free and on target. It sounds like it is a lot of work that has
to be done on a daily basis. Could those of you who run blogs on
their websites, give me your opinion as to it being worth the time you
are putting into the blog. Any thoughts about do’s and don’ts
regarding setting up a blog are welcome as well. Thanks for your help.

I spend one to two hours a week on my blog, which I host on my own site in WordPress and also keep a mirror hosted on Blogger–probably average three posts per week. Some of these posts I also copy to my AmazonConnect blog, but very few. I spend far more time posting here and other lists. Been doing it for a year and a half, and what scared me off for so long was the idea that I needed to post every day. Of course, you’ll get better results the more often you post.

Some advantages:
* It’s really true that blog posts seem to get into search engines faster
* A post of mine got referenced by Slate.com and I saw a nice traffic spike
* Some of the posts only take five or ten minutes–a paragraph or two, and a link
* One of my long-time goals is to be a syndicated columnist. Last year, I took about six of the longer and best thought out pieces and repackaged them as sample columns. I sent to four syndicates. All said no, but at least I wasn’t creating the articles from scratch!
* I have a small but dedicated following, a few of whom (including at least one listmate) have signed up for e-mail notifications
* Sometimes I can repurpose content–this post, for instance, will make a nice blog entry
* Of course, it’s more links inbound to my site (from the Goggle-owned mirror on Blogger and from anyone referencing my post)
* It seems to add to my credibility when I tell, for instance, reporters that I’ve been blogging on business ethics for over a year

Definitely offer the option of e-mail feeds and XML feeds, and definitely use pingoat.com to tell the world when you update.

As for comment spam, yes, I’ve experienced it. I turned on word Verification on Blogger, and turned on pre-approval on WordPress. No spam gets through, and when someone tried to hammer me on WordPress, I just bulk-deleted all their attempts.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Uncategorized

Just after Enron’s Skilling and Lay are found guilty, a paper in Alberta, Canada, accuses the company of using Alberta as a testing ground for the shenanigans that created havoc in California’s energy market.

It’s been shown that Enron grossly inflated power prices in our province. Apparently this ploy was given the code name, Project Stanley, derived from the name of our top hockey trophy.
Although a probe into Enron by Canada’s Competition Bureau in 2000 found no fault with the corporation, new evidence has reportedly surfaced, showing that there was bragging within its walls about how it had artificially driven up electricity costs in Alberta.

Meanwhile, The Economist reports,

A court in Seoul sentenced Kim Woo-choong, the former boss of Daewoo Group, to ten years in prison and ordered him to forfeit 21 trillion won ($22 billion) for his part in South Korea’s biggest corporate scandal. Mr Kim, who founded the chaebol in 1967, was found guilty of fraud and embezzlement. Daewoo collapsed in 1999 with debts of $80 billion.

Daewoo was once the most prominent of Korea’s industrial giants.

Meanwhile, a Hong Kong newspaper offers a general challenge to the long-held culture of family controlled business in Hong Kong and China:

Overdone patronage begets corruption, begets poor business culture, economic waste, social dysfunction. Getting rid of the patronage system has clear benefits for all and managerialism can in some cases undermine the worst aspects of the family-run model. But, like all coins, this one can be flipped. On the other side are the lessons learnt from the US shareholder model which provide specific warnings.

But the paper warns that the Enron verdict proves the corporate model favored in America…

can be just as arrogant and irresponsible as the most parochial family business. The bottom line is that the shareholder model as practiced in the United States is no bulwark to an elitist, irresponsible and corrupted cabal of managers ascending to a position of omnipotence and over-riding due process, ignoring the law, and marginalizing the standards of ethical business practice.

Meanwhile, an Australian blogger reports on a telecommunications stock so shaky after corporate scandals that shareholders tried to unload their stock on eBay!

As scandal after corporate scandal was revealed, all leading straight to the CEO’s large, but mostly unused desk, calls for his head were answered with his sacking. Used to years of bad results the shareholders – by now nearly 70% of all Australians – welcomed the news, but when he was awarded a $50 million payout, it was the final straw.

And one final meanwhile, here at home, wrangling continues over whether the FBI had the right to raid the office of a sitting Congressman accused in a bribery investigation. Frist says the FBI was justified; Hastert and DeLay say they overstepped. And just to show that the GOP doesn’t have a lock on ethical failure, the representative in question is William Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Trends/News, Uncategorized

I promised on May 24 I’d post the results of my press release offering to comment on the Enron verdict. And being a man of honor who writes about ethics, I’m keeping that promise.

Results were less than stellar. An email drop to some 700 outlets resulted in *one* radio interview–admittedly, nationally syndicated and for a full hour. PR Web claims 36,997 people saw the press release (which means they saw at least the headline) and 398 media outlets picked it up but none used it. This is about half the number of page views of my previous two releases posted there, but both of those have been up quite a bit longer.

But here’s the really astonishing thing: not only did my carefully crafted press release (vetted with a PR expert before it went out) fall flat, it seems that almost no one was looking for comments on this big, big story.

Watching Google-flagged alerts for business ethics and related topics in the days following the verdict, I found only one case of a reporter turning to expert sources to comment on the case: the South Bend, Indiana paper, interviewing two professors from Notre Dame and another local university.

There were quite a number of reporters who made their own comments, all of them roundly critical of Lay and Skilling. But nobody was talking to experts.

Strange!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Uncategorized

After six years of Bush appointees who either had no qualifications or who strongly backed various immoral and heartless positions, it’s nice to see an environmentalist and someone who seems to pay attention to ethics nominated for Secretary of the Treasury: Henry “Hank” Paulson. There’s a nice profile of him in the UK paper, The Telegraph–one of several I’ve read that all seem to agree–at least on casual glance, he appears to be a good guy.

Lord knows, we need a few of those!

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

A sad day: The Supreme Court overturned its previous rulings and decided that managers can “discipline” and even terminate government whistleblowers. Whistleblowers in both government and business play a key role in keeping folks honest.

But this court seems set on a path of helping both the government and corporate sectors hide their misdeeds and mistakes.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

How small-minded and unethical they get! the Washington Post, which offers several articles on the incident, and found these examples:

“People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings.” is softened to “I learned in Washington that there is an ‘overclass’ in this country stocked with cheating, shifty human beings that’s just as morally repugnant as our ‘underclass.’ ”

Leaving aside for a moment the question about whether you want your president’s domestic policy advisor to think that the poor are morally repugnant–he altered this quote while leaving the name of the New Times reporter on the article!

Helen Thomas was all over White House press secretary Tony Snow about the content of this quote and what kind of man Zinsmeister must be–but it wasn’t reported that she addressed the issue of changing the remarks.

On Iraq…

“To say nothing of whether it was executed well or not, but it’s brave and admirable.” The altered copy deleted any hint of presidential criticism, saying only, “It’s a brave and admirable attempt to improve the world.”

Zinsmeister says he did it to increase the accuracy of the quotes and protect the reporter, Justin Park, from embarrassment. But given the very happy thank-you note he sent to Park immediately after the piece ran, this is highly dubious.

I begin to wonder if there is anyone in the high levels of the Bush administration who actually understands ethics. Note to the administration: chutzpah is not a substitute for ethics.

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