On 8th of July, gathering more than forty people, the breakfast conference organized by Nicomak on ethics practices in companies after the crisis succeeded in revealing the way different companies implemented ethics into their professional practices.
After a short chronology underlining how ethics came out on stage during the last twenty years, qualified speakers detailed concrete cases they cope with in their companies such as cultural gaps, implementation of directives from the corporate to the subsidiaries and the benefits they get out of this implementation. 
CSR is the center of companies' preoccupations now that they are out of the economic crisis, in a way to build up on their values.   
A discussion of one of the dilemmas from our tool, Ethimak as then launched. This exercise let the public  consider the relevance of the concept of corporate culture in order to establish clear practices and recommandations for code of ethics.

It is still possible to order the acts of our events here (French).

from The Daily Stat, from Harvard Business Publishing, April 21st, 2010.

If the media publicizes whistle-blowers' allegations of financial misconduct, companies are 2.4 times more likely than others to have to restate their financial results, and their stock price tends to suffer for two years. But if the allegations aren't picked up by the media, no such effects occur, says a study led by Shiva Rajgopal of Emory University. The research, based on analysis of 81 companies, appears in the American Accounting Association's journal Accounting Review.

From The Daily Stat, from Harvard Business Publishing, April 22nd, 2010, inspired by an article on NRC Handeslblatt

The 600 top managers at Netherlands-based paint and chemical company AkzoNobel will see their remuneration reduced if they fail to take steps to reduce carbon emissions or develop environmentally friendly products, according to the newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Following AkzoNobel's 2009 announcement, several other Dutch multinationals, including Shell, announced similar policies.

from The Daily Stat, from Harvard Business Publishing, April 21st, 2010.

To reduce ink use and save money, the University of Wisconsin Green Bay's IT department has changed the default font for Outlook to Century Gothic, which it says requires 30% less ink in printouts than Arial, the most commonly used default font. Ink accounts for about 60% of the cost of a printed page, the IT unit says.

Some good and easy-to-implement ideas like this one can have a tangible impact on two of your bottom-lines!

Here you can find a small article on new talks on how to promote CSR through trading, like it has been done for the Carbon market.

We like the idea in general, but we see two main limitations:

• How do you measure CSR? How do you measure social impact vs economic impact?
• Who will decide: which companies will participate? how wil quotas be allocated?

Nicomak is providing solutions to provide some kind of measures for success in ethics inside a company, but there is nothing harder than to efficiently and relevantly compare apples and pears ...

from The Daily Stat, from Harvard Business Publishing, January 18th, 2010. 

Although flexible work plans are the commonest way to support gender diversity, they're still fairly uncommon: Only 30% of companies in a McKinsey survey reported offering options for flexible working conditions. Even where gender diversity is a top-three agenda item, just a quarter of the respondents say their companies' performance evaluations are structured to neutralize the potential negative career impact of flexible work.

Source: Why Profit Shouldn't Be Your Top Goal in Harvard Business Review, December 2009

If the CEO's primary focus is profit, employees tend to be less willing to sacrifice for the company than if the CEO makes it a priority to balance the needs of customers, employees, the community, and the environment, according to Nathan T. Washburn of Thunderbird School of Global Management and three coauthors who studied 520 organizations in 17 countries.

 from The Daily Stat, from Harvard Business Publishing, September 25th, 2009.          

Lower-level managers trust strangers as much as their bosses. Both earned a 3.6 on a 1 to 5 trust scale. Higher-level managers trust their bosses slightly more (3.9 to 3.6), but that trust could be misguided; researcher Michael Segalla's data suggests higher-level managers are more likely to get laid off.
Source: Michael Segalla, Professor of Management, HEC, Paris

From The Business Insider, August 9th, 2009

Is corporate responsibility vindicated by the financial crisis?

Judging by public and political outrage over executive compensation, lack of transparency, complex financial products and other hallmarks of Wall Street's gilded age, it appears so.  Sure, some of that anger is misplaced, and the concept of the ethical company has always faced criticisms, none stronger than economist Milton Friedman's famed line that the "social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. "But there's a good argument that companies that took business ethics seriously before the crisis have sailed through it; those that favored short term profits over long term viability have not.

Writing in BusinessWeek, Vivek Wadhwa of Harvard and Duke draws out some interesting examples:

Charles Schwab & Co. has largely avoided the huge fallout. So has US Bancorp. A quality both of these companies share is a laser-like focus on customer service and on honesty and transparency. This comes from their cultures...A number of companies...either started out with or developed an internal voice and a moral compass. That voice has played a key role in keeping these companies on top. The list of these companies reads like a Who's Who of American business' management rock stars. Some, such as Goldman Sachs, have been discredited. But the majority, including Cisco Systems, Southwest Airlines, and Costco Wholesale, among others, have sailed through this crisis with flying colors.

On the other hand, Wadhwa says companies like Bank of America and Citigroup suppressed ethical dissent, contributing to their -- and Wall Streets -- epic fall. "The internal voice of conscience and purpose of these institutions was silenced by a maniacal focus on short-term profits and whatever scheme would bring them in," he says.

Wadhwa's conclusion is this:

The moral here is fairly simple: When a company's ethical compass is pointing true north, everything else falls into line. This isn't to say that companies with great ethics don't fail. But it does seem to indicate that companies without good ethics are far more likely to fail due to their inability to sustain or hear an inner voice to guide them through the dark times to the light.

The Daily Stat, from Harvard Business Publishing, June 9th, 2009.
Changing a company is tough: only about 40% of transformation programs succeed, according to McKinsey research. But some change programs have a better chance than others: defensive transformations (those undertaken to stem trouble) have lower success rates than progressive ones (launched, for instance, to boost growth or to move from good to great performance). Trigger events matter, too. Some change programs are initiated proactively, while others are undertaken in reaction to external shocks, market pressure, or poor financial performance. Our research finds that most successful transformations are those that are both offensive and proactive — we call them "progressive" — which have a 47% success rate. Defensive transformations have a 34% rate of success.
Source: Creating Organizational Transformations: McKinsey Global Survey Results