Over the course of our careers, virtually all of us will be faced with an ethical quandary. It could be pressure from a boss to “hit the numbers.” It could be arm-twisting to “be a team player” when dealing with questionable supplier practices. Or it could be our own rationalizations for looking the other way – “Everyone is doing it” or “This isn’t my responsibility.”Indeed, the world of business can be murky at times.
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"Business ethics” means very different things to different students – depending upon where they are raised and the experiences that they have had to date.
May 15, 2013
During my time at Bentley, I took a variety of business courses. We all know that to be a successful business person in today’s world, you need a variety of skills and exposure to many different ways of thinking.In one class, Professor Tim Anderson introduced the talking stick.
May 9, 2013
Learning deepens when students, alumni and guest companies grab the tools to take matters into their own hands.
May 3, 2013
The presence of women on the boards of public companies has been increasing virtually everywhere in the world — except in the United States. Why?
April 30, 2013
I am a baby boomer, one of the many Americans approaching their dream retirement age. I am also one of the many baby boomers who has a little panic attack every time I look at my retirement accounts and my exposure to the whims of the stock market.One of the questions that I often get as a financial planner (and one that I ask myself) is: Should I take money out of my retirement account to pay off the remaining balance on my home’s mortgage?
April 25, 2013
Breaking down barriers to emphasize themes and synergy.
April 22, 2013
Will challenging conventional wisdom get you where you want to be?
April 11, 2013
A freshman class is more than the sum of its parts. Here's how a seasoned admissions director views the task of building a diverse and successful college cohort.
April 5, 2013
The news is full of stories about the hacking into large companies: Burger King, Jeep, The New York Times, and even supposedly adept tech companies such as Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft. Unfortunately, hacking isn’t just for the big boys - small businesses are facing an unprecedented threat of cyberattacks.
April 3, 2013
When it comes to malaria intervention, sometimes I feel like I’m watching a train heading over a cliff in slow motion. If you get your malaria news from the media, this might surprise you.
March 28, 2013
Midway through a successful career, here is what I wished I'd known about getting prepared to operate in the corporate world.
March 26, 2013
Mohammed Yunis came up with a good idea: Give small loans to people who don’t have access to capital. A high percentage of the world’s population lives at a subsistence level. They spend all they make on food, and have none left for an “investment” that might make their microbusiness more profitable. If you could buy more bananas in the first place, your profit would be higher.
March 21, 2013
What should be the role of the liberal arts in business education? As we witness huge increases in the cost of formal education, every student has a right to ask what the best use of their time and investment in higher education should be. As educators, we owe it to them to justify the mix of professional training and personal enrichment we offer them.
March 19, 2013
New technologies have always produced unintended consequences. But user experience (UX) designers and engineers face a number of new ethical challenges today with the rise of technology and our interaction and dependence on it.
March 13, 2013
Visits to real-world companies benefit students and corporations alike. Find out how one professor reinforces classroom learning by immersing his class in the day-to-day operations of manufacturing and service organizations.
March 6, 2013
United Fruit Co. in Guatemala. Aramco in Saudi Arabia. Blackwater and Halliburton in Iraq. We are familiar with a few private American companies that have played at foreign policy in our recent history. One of the first and ultimately most influential, however, is also the least known.
March 5, 2013
“Marissa Mayer Is Wrong.” “Horrible Bosses: Marissa Mayer’s Ban on Telecommuting at Yahoo Won’t Work.” “Marissa Mayer’s Work-From-Home Ban Is the Exact Opposite of What CEOs Should Be Doing.” These headlines reflect popular responses in the blogosphere to the Yahoo CEO’s decision to end work-from-home arrangements companywide.
February 28, 2013
There is an adage in the organizational behavior world that posits that employees don’t leave organizations; rather, they leave bad managers who create and perpetuate toxic work environments. Instead of “sick” buildings, where workers develop physical maladies because of emanations from poorly ventilated insulation or carpeting, these are emotionally toxic environments that at times can border on abusive.
February 26, 2013
With the business model of the credit rating agencies in the news again, we wonder if there will be more than partial repairs.Since U.S. Attorney Eric Holder filed suit against the market leader, Standard & Poor’s, seeking $5 billion in damages, we are about to find out.
February 21, 2013
Natural disasters have the power to tear down a city’s infrastructure in a matter of minutes. What makes one region fare better than another?
February 19, 2013
Business innovation has a problem. A recent working paper by Robert Gorden titled “Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds” suggests that “innovation does not have the same potential to create growth in the future as in the past.”
February 13, 2013
One of the greatest operational issues is “staffing mismatches.” Having people in the wrong roles can create a dysfunctional organization and keep your company from growing. Operations teams need to run like a well-oiled machine, and in order for that to happen it is crucial to have the right people in the right jobs.New Employees
February 11, 2013
Why students should study our most basic law
February 6, 2013
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino may be the most underrated politician in America. Marble-mouthed, no one’s idea of a matinee idol, just coming back from a serious set of health problems, the 20-year veteran of City Hall’s corner office nonetheless gave a bravura performance in his January 29 State of the City address.
February 5, 2013