By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

Two days ago, I wrote about the CEO of Radio Shack, who somehow didn’t notice that he hadn’t actually gotten the college degree he’d been claiming to have.

Now, I’ve discovered that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (a Democrat, I’ll point out to those who think I only attack Republicans) somehow didn’t notice that he hadn’t been drafted by the Kansas City (now Oakland) Atheltics major league baseball team.

I don’t believe this any more than I believed the guy from Radio shack. Sheesh! What’s with these people?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

You’d think people would know by now not to lie on their resume. Apparently not, however. Reuters reports that Radio Shack’s CEO, David Edmondson, lied about his degree. Here’s the story as reported in USA Today. Plus he’s had at least three rounds of court proceedings for drunk driving.

Two things astonish me about this article.

First, his utter shameless chutzpah:

Edmondson issued a statement Wednesday admitting that he erroneously said he received a Bachelor of Science degree, a four-year college degree.

The CEO said he now believes he received a ThG diploma, which is awarded for completing a three-year degree in theology.

Uhh, hello–you don’t erroneously claim a degree. An error implies an honest mistake. This was a lie, plain and simple, and please let’s not try to pretend otherwise. the article goes on to speculate about whether he even receive the ThG, and also noted that he claimed a degree his school didn’t offer, and that the school has no record of his graduation at all. Not pretty! This is the sort of ducking of responsibility you expect from an irresponsible teenager raised by incompetent parents–not the CEO of one of the largest electronics retailers in the world.

Second, the amazing statement at the end of the article:

The resume issues and DWI issues raised speculation about whether Edmondson would survive as RadioShack’s CEO.

Speculation? Speculation! Any company that doesn’t instantly demand the resignation of a CEO caught lying on his resume should have its collective head examined. If ethics means anything anymore, that should be a zero-tolerance, one-strike-and-you’re-out, no-severance package offense. Followed by a lawsuit for fraud.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News

Unlike the GoDaddy valentine I wrote about last week, this one was not cheap. But it’s promoting a movie so they probably had a lot of the footage.

A set of three trailers for “The Secret.” After seeing the intro and the first trailer, I signed up for their mailing list–I’m ready to see this movie! The second and third trailers were significantly less impressive.

One particular thing that shows these people really understand marketing: once you’ve viewed any of the trailers, the finish screen gives you several viral tools I hadn’t even come across before: Furl, Blogmark, and Delicious. I think we’ll be seeing not only more really classy high-end videos like this (it even looked good on Windows Media Player, at both high and low bandwidth–while most WMP files look pretty jerky and crude on my system–they also offer Quciktime and Flash). Oddly enough, there were a lot more captions on the low-bandwidth version.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Even George Will thinks Bush has gone too far with his illegal spying.

If the Bush doctrine holds, he writes, future administrations won’t even bother consulting Congress even before going to war:

Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration’s stance…

And derides Bush for a double standard on new interpretations of the law.

Worth reading.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

OK, it’s starting: the sworn testimony under oath that tells us what we knew all along.

Here it is: Enron’s top executives were directly ordering their cooked books.

In this story on the BBC, Convicted executive Ken Rice, who ran Enron’s EBS Internet business subsidiary, testifies that Jeffrey Skilling himself told him, “this is what the number is going to be.”

A number, of course, that had no relation to the real number. Rice said this division was actually selling future revenues, becuase there were no current ones.

And Skilling was involved at every level. “Mr. Skilling was very engaged in the business, he was very hands-on,” Mr Rice said. “Almost any transaction of any size we would bring to Mr Skilling to get his approval.”

Why am I not surprised?

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

As a Massachusetts taxpayer, I resent this. The Boston Globe reports that several Boston-area hospitals have wildly overcharged the state on charges for caring for indigent patients.

Two among several examples cited:

[Cambridge Health Alliance] charged the pool $6,469 for 100 tablets of the anticholesterol drug Lipitor, for which it should have charged $224. In total, overcharges for Lipitor amounted to $1 million.

Boston Medical Center dramatically marked up charges for CT scans: $2,677 for a specific type of scan compared to $272 to $436 that Medicare or a private HMO would pay.

Hmph. It almost sounds like these folks borrowed some procurement “experts” from the Pentagon. You’d think the Mitt Romney administration, which ran on a campaign of fiscal responsibility, would pay more attention.

Now, keep in mind, these are only allegations–note the question mark in my headline. But they’re serious allegations, and I hope the Riley probe is thorough and fast.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

George C. Deutsch worked at NASA until yesterday. This was the guy who didn’t want to let reporters talk to NASA scientists who believe that there is in fact a climate change problem–or other science issues that did not follow the Bush administration line. He’s also the one who would not let the agency utter the phrase “Big Bang” without following it with “Theory.”

According to his resume, he graduated from Texas A&M University in 2003. According to the university, however, in a document released yesterday, he did no such thing. He attended, but never finished.

He’s only 24, but you’d think by now he’d have figured out a cardinal rule: never lie on your resume. Not only is it unethical, but it’s awfully easy to catch if anyone bothers to check.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

My congratulations to Noel L. Hillman, chief of the Department of Justice’s public integrity division, and until the other day, lead investigator in the Abramoff scandal. President Bush just named him to a judgeship.

Unfortunately, this rather too conveniently leaves this crucial probe, which has reached into many corners of the Washington bureaucracy, a rudderless ship.

Is this a coincidence? I rather doubt it. I am in no way impugning the integrity of Mr. Hillman, but I do wonder if he would have been promoted had he not been uncovering this nasty bit of business.

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By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics

I wrote on January 29,

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.

Yesterday, Publishers Weekly interviewed Frey’s agent, Kassie Evashevski, who had this to say:

I think the confusion over fiction vs. nonfiction may stem from the fact that early in the submission process, James raised the issue of whether he could publish it as an autobiographical novel–ONLY, he said, to spare his family undue embarrassment, NOT because it wasn’t true. I told him I would bring it up with a few publishers, which I did, and the response was unanimous:if the book is true, it should be published as a memoir.

James personally explained to his editor that the events depicted in the book took place as described. Based on the information given us by the author, [editor] Sean McDonald and [publisher] Nan Talese believed in good faith they were buying a memoir, just as I believed I was selling them one.

I guess the only way we’ll know for certain is if someone can turn up his original correspondence–but of course, even that will have to be scrutinized, as in this case, it would be all-too-easy to pull the kind of faked-memo shenanigans that got Dan Rather in so much trouble back in ’04.

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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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