08 Aug Pick a company that has been implicated recently in a corporate scandal.
All major firms have a code of ethics, which is a document that stipulates that they are committed to a standard of ethical behavior that goes above and beyond what the law of the land stipulates (if the firm was merely following the laws of the land, it wouldn’t need a separate code of ethics). But do firms actually believe in their own code? Do its employees adhere to it? For this discussion, I want you to do the following:
1) Pick a company that has been implicated recently in a corporate scandal. For instance, you can choose to look at Volkswagen (the emissions cheating scandal), Facebook (privacy violations), Boeing (failure to ground faulty planes resulting in hundreds of deaths), McKinsey (one of the most famous names in management consulting that proposed cutting spending on food and medical care for migrant detainees in order to save costs), Wells Fargo (that opened millions of fraudulent accounts), Duetche Bank and Hongkong Bank (money laundering)… the list is endless. Read about the scandal from multiple sources. Check to see what the PR response of the firm was.
2) Look up the firm’s “Code of Ethics” (or “Code of Conduct”) on their website.
3) Answer the following questions:
(a) Did the company follow its own code of ethics? If not, why not?
(b) If the code of ethics is not enforced in so many corporations, what is the point of having it? What purpose do you think it serves?
Principles of Management Available at: https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-mana…
Please reference chapter 5 from the textbook (link above) as well as two other references
