Transocean Executive Compensation Bonuses Ignored the Rig Explosion of 2010

Transocean, the world’s largest off-shore oil rig company, owned the Deep Water Horizon rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April of 2010. Astonishingly, the company awarded its managers healthy bonuses. Even more astonishing, safety was a major component in the calculation of the bonuses. Even without intending to, the compensation sets up managers in a conflict of interest—their compensation motivating them to keep up the good work rather than to correct for what went wrong in the management of the Horizon rig. In other words, the bonuses give all the wrong incentives, and there has been no principled leadership to point in the other direction.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, which is available at Amazon.

Government Employees and Manufacturing Jobs: Takers and Makers?

I contend that we need to expand our notion of “making” in the twenty-first century global economy. We also need to reduce our conception of “taking” when it comes to what government employees do and even in what the government does. Otherwise, even Steven Moore might be left with the unavoidable conclusion that the American corporations, even more so than the “welfare mothers,” are the “takers.”

The full essay is at "Takers and Makers."

Social Media Companies: Is Blocking Political-Protester Content a Political or Business Decision?

The question of the role of social media internet companies as protesters have used social-media platforms to communicate before and during protests exploded on the world stage in "Arab Spring" going in the Middle East in early 2011. Lest it be presumed that the companies' respective policies were relevant only in terms of what content (or users) was allowed and how that content could impact events on the ground, the policies themselves reflect the claim made by the West of what liberty means. In other words, if social media companies were (allowed to be) oppressive or otherwise not respectful of their customers, the overall message to the oppressed in the Middle East could not have been that greater freedom is indeed possible because it exists in the West. Lest our own private sector unwittingly undercut the words and efforts of the protesters, we might want to use this case to ask if we couldn’t be freer too.

The full essay is at "Social Media Companies and Political Content."

Flickering Ethics at Flickr: On the Ethics of Enforcement

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the ethics involved in providing a social media service for the public.  The article describes how “(t)wo days after using Flickr to display photos of police officers from Egypt’s feared state security force, Hossam el-Hamalawy watched in disbelief as they vanished, one by one, from the popular social networking site, which he had been using since 2008. ‘I thought I was being hacked,’ said Mr. el-Hamalawy, a prominent Egyptian blogger and human rights activist who had uploaded the headshots of the police from CDs found by activists early this month at the State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City. He later learned . . .  that the photos had been removed because he did not take the images himself, a violation of the site’s . . . rules. ‘That is totally ludicrous,’ he said. ‘Flickr is full of accounts with photos that people did not take themselves.’”

 

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.