Who cares? Ethics and ‘caring’ in the boardroom

Conference: Global Research Foundation for Corporate Governance

Dates: 11-14 September 2024

Abstract:

Corporate boardrooms are the pinnacles of governance in the business world, but that doesn’t automatically make them paragons of the highest standards. The litany of corporate failures attests to that: in 2019, Wirecard, the fintech superstar in Germany, shot up to a place among the top 30 companies in Germany only to crash and burn the next year, with its CEO sent to prison and its COO on the run. In 2018, Carillion, a constituent of the FTSE100 index and a large government contractor plunged suddenly into insolvency, without even enough cash to pay administrators to conduct a salvage operation. Satyam, its name the Sanskit word for “truth” and for India’s tech outsourcing miracle, won the Golden Peacock award from the World Council on Corporate Governance in 2008. It was too good to be true. By the end of the year its scandal made headlines around the world. We may never know what happened in the boardrooms of these companies and others that failed – some less spectacularly than these, other even more so. We know, however, that a lot of other companies persist in creating good returns for shareholders by making good products for customers. Some even provide considerable value for the societies in which they operate. But even there we don’t know much about what happens in their boardrooms, whether ethical issues every rise to the fore, whether any give serious consideration of the consequences of their decisions beyond the bottom-line version of utility, or whether director duties in law ever arise, let alone the broader conception of duty in ethics.

Source: Manual