Good news from the Ethics Resource Center’s late-2009 update to its ongoing National Business Ethics Survey:

• Misconduct is decreasing: Fewer employees said they had witnessed misconduct on the job (the measure fell from 56 percent in 2007 to 49 percent in 2009);

• Whistle-blowing is increasing: More employees said they had reported misconduct when they observed it (63 percent in 2009, up from 58 percent in 2007);

• Ethical cultures are becoming stronger: ERC’s measures of the strength of ethical culture in the workplace increased from 53 percent in 2007 to 62 percent in 2009; and

• Pressure to cut corners is dropping: Perceived pressure to commit an ethics violation – to cut corners, or worse – declined from 10 percent 2 years ago to 8 percent last year.

(The ERC updates the survey every 2 years.)

Here’s the bad news: The good news may soon evaporate.

“We are experiencing an ethics bubble,” according to the report’s executive summary. “The positive results of this study are likely to be temporary. We are beginning to see an important connection between workplace ethics and the larger economic and business cycle: When times are tough, ethics improve.” ###

To be sure, the recession clearly has hurt cross-border business, with the dollar value of global trade falling by nearly one-third between August 2008 and March 2009, although it has since rebounded some, The World Bank reports in “Global Economic Prospects 2010.”

However, globalization marches on, and companies still are expanding abroad. In fact, earnings from the foreign affiliates of U.S.-based companies grew from $63 to $80 billion between the first and third quarters of 2009, reports the U.S. Department of Commerce. The report acknowledges that the increase partly reflects the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, which makes earnings of foreign affiliates relatively higher when compared to domestic earnings. Even so, the report adds that the pickup in activity in some foreign countries also contributed to the uptick in earnings. more

Have you figured out what your next PC will be? I’m willing to bet it won’t be a desktop machine. You probably won’t even get another laptop when you retire your current one. Then what, a netbook? Possibly. The smart money, however, is betting your next computing device will be a mobile phone, specifically a new smartphone.

A year ago, Gartner predicted that corporate America will be supporting more mobile phones than desktop phones by 2011. “The adoption and standardization of corporate-liable mobile phones in the enterprise has been driven by the use of smartphones, wireless e-mail, and the integration of these phones into IP telephony systems,” according to Phil Redman, research vice president at Gartner. The telcos and phone makers are further fueling the trend with each new product release.

If business executives are getting new smartphones, they also won’t be needing their old desktop and laptop PCs. For the kind of work most executives do, a smartphone with access to the wealth of SaaS applications may be enough. more

Closing Risk Management Gaps from BusinessFinanceMag on Vimeo.

Steve Culp, leader of Accenture’s global risk management practice, visited with us at Business Finance’s NYC offices last week. When it comes to risk management advisory, few executives are as aware of present day risk management challenges as Steve. We asked him to supply us with a few of the best practices that companies could use to align their business strategies with their “risk appetites.”

From the top desk to the desktop, in many organizations there can be a wide divide between the executives in their large corner offices and the managers and employees. The separation I am referring to is between the strategy formulated by the executive team and the employees tasked to implement it. It is rare that there is a good connection between the two.

As evidence, at the 2009 annual conference of the balanced scorecard organization, The Palladium Group, led by Dr. David P. Norton and Dr. Robert S. Kaplan, in Dr. Norton’s keynote presentation he stated that seven out of ten organizations fail to successfully execute the strategy designed by its executives. What explains this? Advocates of strategy map and balanced scorecard methods believe that this is in large part because most managers and employees do not adequately know what their organization’s strategy is. For example, if I randomly interviewed 15 of your organization’s employees in a hallway and said, “Quick! Explain your executive team’s strategy!,” how many of them could describe it well? Maybe none. What’s the consequence? If employees and managers do not understand the executive team’s strategy, then how can we expect them to understand that what they do each week and month contributes to achieving that strategy? more