The End of Ethics and A Way Back: How To Fix A Fundamentally Broken Global Financial System

Chapter 10

The Case for Reintroducing Governance and Morality

This chapter explores how governance and personal morality and ethics have fallen by the wayside and the essential changes that need to be made to revitalize our global society with virtue.

The Important Demand for Corporate Governance

In the last decades, a plethora of laws, rules, and cases have sought to make companies and other entities and their senior-most executives, especially CFOs, more accountable for the manner in which they manage their organizations.

Indeed, there is universal demand for higher standards of independent corporate governance worldwide. For many institutions, the problems lie in the implementation.

Likewise, in the nonprofit and governmental sectors, illegality concerns at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the Red Cross’s potential mishandling of the 9/11 funds, the government’s abuse of taxpayer funds in various outlandish spending scandals, mismanagement of the relief efforts after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the United Nations’ missteps of the Oil for Food Program in Iraq highlight the ubiquity of concerns for governance and transparency and their great impact on the public and private sectors.

Corporate governance is the foundation of rules, “norms,” and ethics by which boards of directors meet their fiduciary responsibilities and create accountability, justice, and transparency for shareholders, investors, and other stakeholders in their business and greater community.

While in the private ...