Business Ethics Week 2014
Posted by Joseph Phillips, Jr. on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 at 3:43 PM PDT
May 5-9 was Business Ethics Week in the Albers School. Throughout the week, nearly 70 business professionals visited more than 100 classes to discuss a business ethics challenge they had faced at some point in their careers. Over 80% of Albers classes participated. There were also three keynote speakers during the week:
Howard Behar, former President of Starbucks International, on May 5th.
Andy Hinton, VP for Ethics and Compliance at Google, on May 6th. He also spoke at the Albers Alumni Breakfast Series the morning of May 7th.
Nancy Higgins, VP for Ethics and Compliance at Bechtel and Carolyn Barton, Chief Compliance and Ethics Officer at Group Health, on May 7th.
The purpose of Business Ethics Week is to emphasize to students the importance of ethical behavior in the conduct of business, and to show that it is essential in order to be successful as a professional. The idea for Business Ethics Week came from the advisory board of the Center for Business Ethics. Originally, the idea was to have members of the board pick a day and cover classes throughout the day. We challenged the board to cover all the classes meeting on a particular day and to include other business professionals. In the first year, the event went reasonably well, but we received inquiries from students and faculty members who were not in class for what was Business Ethics Day. In the second year, we established Business Ethics Week, which would allow more classes to participate. We tried to cover all the classes meeting during a week, and ended with 84 classes participating, about 70% coverage. This was the third year and the second year for Business Ethics Week, and we were able to expand coverage to over 100 classes.
Business Ethics Week was sponsored by the Albers Center for Business Ethics, with Professor Marc Cohen and grad student JP McCarvel doing much of the work. Congratulations to them on a successful Business Ethics Week!