Lies and the Lying Entrepreneurs Who Tell Them As we prepared a recent blog post about the fintech start-up Robin Hood, we noticed that a worrisome number of articles have been published in recent years about lying by entrepreneurs. Many of them recount stories of entrepreneurs’ telling brazen lies to save their companies. Gary Hirshberg (Stonyfield Farm) told the SBA that he had […] View
Deliberate Ignorance and Moral Wiggle Room You would think that rational human beings would gather all easily-acquired information that is relevant to a decision before they make that decision. Not so. Rather, people often prefer deliberate ignorance, defined by scholars Brown and Walasek as “the conscious individual or collective choice not to seek or use information in a situation where the […] View
Robinhood: A Case Study in Entrepreneurial Ethics Over the years, ethicists have paid particular attention to entrepreneurs, partly because there is some evidence that entrepreneurs may be special folks with unusual appetites for risk, significant overconfidence, and optimism untethered to reality. And partly because the competitive pressures faced by entrepreneurs often create special incentives to commit unethical actions. One of the more […] View
Being True to your “True Self” Whether it’s Donald Trump believing that he is a “stable genius” or Charles Barkley saying “I believe I’m the best-looking guy in the world and I might be right,” people (especially men) tend toward overconfidence. This overconfidence often manifests itself in the moral realm. As Bazerman and Tenbrunsel note: “It’s likely that most of us […] View
You Should Look at “Made You Look” “Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art” is an engaging crime documentary directed, co-written and co-produced by filmmaker Barry Avrich. It is the story of an $80 million art fraud in New York City. In rough outline, around 1995 a woman named Glafira Rosales appeared out of the blue and told Ann Freedman, […] View
Anti-Asian Violence and the Bystander Effect Violence against Asian-Americans continues to occur in unprecedented and unacceptable numbers. The New York Times recently reported on a “rising tide” of incidents where people of Asian descent were “pushed, beaten, kicked, spit on and called slurs,” (Cai et al.) typically accompanied by a reference to the coronavirus, as if the victim had any more […] View
“The Banality of Evil, MBA Edition” Last month, legendary management consultant and McKinsey alumnus Tom Peters said he was “angry, disgusted and sickened” by McKinsey’s role in the opioid crisis that has killed roughly half a million people by overdose in the past 21 years. McKinsey may well be chastened by this strong criticism from an august former employee, but it’s […] View
Governor Cuomo: “The Creeps” as a Moral Emotion? You’ve probably seen the picture of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Anna Ruch at a 2019 wedding. She approached him to thank him for a toast he had offered. He put his hand on her exposed back, and then, as you can see in the picture, put his hands on both her cheeks and […] View
Seeking Virtue in Finance: A Futile Search? At the McCombs School of Business, we train thousands of undergraduate and MBA students to pursue careers in finance. For the most part, these are nice, honest, well-meaning youngsters who wish to lead honorable lives but face great trepidation as they prepare to enter the finance profession, which is often a moral cesspool. We don’t […] View
What’s up With White Collar Crime? We started reading Jennifer Taub’s book on white collar crime–Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime–on the December 2020 day that President Trump announced pardons for Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner and 26 other mostly white collar criminals. Coincidentally, Taub begins her book noting that: Just after Valentine’s […] View