1.What else might you need to know in order to effectively evaluate Professor Newton's conclusion?

2.What ethical issues are involved in the challenges she addresses?

3.Who are the stakeholders?

4.What do you think about her evaluation of the alternatives above?

5.How do the alternatives compare? How do the alternatives affect the stakeholders?

This Decision Point addresses the implications for change resulting from the Enron debacle. Dr. Lisa Newton analyzes the possible responses that we could utilize as a society. Contemplate her arguments that some responses will not work and consider whether you agree or disagree:

More regulation: "The people who are making the money eat regulations for breakfast. You can't pass regulations fast enough to get in their way." Regulations are bad for business, she states, they do not have sufficient foresight; and virtual and global business leaves us with little to grasp in terms of regulation.

Business ethics courses: Newton contends that they are ineffective in guiding future action, and they do not sufficiently impact motivations.

Changes in corporate cultures: "What the company's officers do, when they act for good or (more likely) evil, does not proceed from the corporate culture, as if the corporate culture caused their actions...What people do, habitually, just is their character, which they create by doing those things. What a corporation does, through its officers, just is its culture, created by that behavior. To say that if we change the culture, we'll change the behavior is a conceptual mistake - trivial or meaningless."

Does anything work? "Back to those other eras; this is not the first time that, up to our waists in the muck of corporate dishonesty, we have contemplated regulations and ethics classes and using large rough weapons on the corporate culture. And nothing we did in the past worked."

Instead, Newton posits, "capitalism was always known not to contain its own limits; the limits were to be imposed by the democratic system, whose representatives were the popularly elected watchdogs of the economy." Business crime comes not from "systemic capitalist contradictions" or sin; instead, it...arises from a failure of the instruments of democracy, which have been weakened by three decades of market fundamentalism, privatization ideology and resentment of government. Capitalism is not too strong; democracy is too weak. We have not grown too hubristic as producers and consumers [as if the market were, when working right, capable of governing itself]; we have grown too timid as citizens, acquiescing to deregulation and privatization (airlines, accounting firms, banks, media conglomerates, you name it) and a growing tyranny of money over politics.

Newton then explains that "we need, as Theodore Roosevelt well knew (20 years before his cousin presided over the aftermath of the 1929 disaster), democratic oversight of the market, or it will run amok. As it has."

Her conclusion? "Ultimately, our whining and handwringing about corporate culture, or executive incentives, or other technicalities of the way businesses run themselves, is useless. Business was never supposed to run itself, at least not for long. We the people were supposed to be taking responsibility for its operations as a whole. We have evaded this responsibility for almost a quarter of a century now, and that's long enough.It is time to remember that we have a public responsibility hat as well as a private enterprise hat, to put it on and put the country back in order."

Is taking public responsibility the answer to ethical lapses in business?