Thinking about cooking the books? Simply a White-Collar crime? Whoops. Bernie Ebbers gets 25 years, John Rigas got 15. Given their ages and health, that’s, effectively, the death penalty.
Wanna bet the sign-up list for “corporate ethics” at the Harvard Business School (et al.) jumps this fall?
(The good news: Most of us don’t have the opportunity to screw our stakeholders out of $11B.)
(I thought the most interesting comment I read yesterday came from former AT&T CEO Mike Armstrong. He said that some of AT&T’s most significant—and costly—strategic decisions were in response to the incredible margins WorldCom was racking up—now known to be phony. Wall Street expected the same from his company. AT&T had a gross of problems, but there’s more than a grain or two of truth to this assessment.)