Insights
It’s official!
I’m an Associate member of the Chartered Governance Institute of SA and will use the professional accreditation ACG (CS), as I continue helping businesses run ethically through good governance, good risk management, and good compliance.
What I learned having cancer in the time of Covid
I don’t usually write about my personal life here. But this crazy, topsy-turvy year has been a year which has melded personal into work and back again, hasn’t it? I learned a great deal in 2020 and thought to share. I was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer, with...
Back to the future
For businesses to thrive in the future, their leaders should lead from a position deeply rooted in ethical values. We’re already in the future, in the third decade of the 2000s, where the vocab about the future of work, and how to work, is so often about change, and...
How to be an ethical entrepreneur
Some associates and I recently got talking about how to encourage smart young people still studying, or starting on their career tracks, to understand and use an ethical approach to work. Many of the young people we were speaking of have a strong desire to start their...
On Some, and Others
In South Africa at the moment, there is outrage and fear related to gender-based violence which stems from the disregard of Some for the value of Others. There is outrage and fear related to xenophobia-related violence which stems from the disregard of Some for the...
They go low, we go high
If you’ve worked with me for any length of time, you’ll know that I am inspired by people who lead from their values or principles, no matter how hard this is. I’ve just read former US First Lady Michelle Obama’s book Becoming. Her story is inspiring, covering her...
A checklist for personal integrity
Imagine if each of us did a regular ethics audit on ourselves. What if each of us really self-managed what we stay true to, how we behave, and how we lead others, versus waiting for the bad stuff to be detected by others, and then addressing it only because we’d been...
Practical ways to navigate a messy world
Over the last seven months, I’ve worked with several groups of businesspeople, at various times needing to answer the question, Why be ethical? And we’ve done that. There are good reasons: Because it’s the good and right way to be Because it’s aligned with one’s...
Being ethical is not rocket science
Last week I talked to the leaders of an organisation which is on a journey to combine compliance and ethics management under the umbrella of good corporate governance. They want to do the right thing. They've reached consensus on what ethics management is, and agreed...
You and I can practice being ethical
Do people who make ethical mistakes, intend to? Was someone like Markus Jooste of Steinhoff infamy born unethical – and if not, how did he come to be the person who rationalised his behaviour and decisions the way he did in front of a joint sitting of Parliamentary...
Five interviews, five conclusions
Corruption Watch reported earlier this year that school principals are the Number One group of people called out for corruption on its hotline. I don’t have any big answers yet as to why that’s the case. But I can say five things for certain. One. The local school...
The cost of ethics
A few years ago I organised and co-hosted a dinner in Johannesburg at which the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University spoke. In attendance were the vice-chancellors of a number of South African universities, and some of the academics published by my (then) employer....