Lucy Kellaway is correct.

In today's Financial Times piece:

If one employee offends against a bank’s vision and values, it is [his or her] fault. If 5,300 do, it is the bank’s. Wells Fargo has proved that its culture is a hopeless safeguard to anything. The people who have really transgressed are not the rank and file, but the top managers who set up the wrong incentives and who looked the other way as customers were stitched up.

It really IS about the incentives.

Another news clip about my talk(s) in Bogota.

Here, and here's the original post.  I'm still just amazed that I was asked to speak, and I'm so grateful to Superintendent Reyes!

Why Lucy Kellaway rocks, part n.

Here. 

Cross-posting about the team that makes a good leader better.

Here.

A "user manual" for a person is a great idea. Here's a first draft of mine.

This piece in Sunday's NYT (here) got me thinking:  most people are mysteries to each other, except maybe to their loved ones (and, even then, there's still some mystery left).  So here are some random thoughts about my working style, and my friends and colleagues are more than welcome to tell me that my opinions of my working style bear very little resemblance to reality.  Of course, I'm a lame duck dean at this point, and perhaps this manual would have been of more use at the beginning of my term.

1. My favorite colleagues are the ones who keep me from doing dumb things (at least without thinking things through first).  Please give me your real opinion, not what you think that I might want to hear.  Make suggestions, both about ideas and about how I might communicate them.  I promise you that you'll get my deep loyalty in return.
2. I am much happier with "direct" and "blunt" than with communication that beats around the bush.  I'm tougher than I look, so direct and blunt language will not bother me.  Waiting for 30 minutes for you to get to the point will bother me.
3. A sense of humor is a wonderful thing.  I love being in a workplace that can produce a belly laugh at least once a day, even if the laugh is triggered by being in the middle of a crazy situation.
4. If I've worked with you for longer than a month, it's because I'm happy with what you're doing.  It's totally OK to make decisions without checking with me, but it's also OK if you want to bounce ideas off me.  I operate on a "clearly erroneous" standard on most decisions--even if it's not the choice I would have made, if you made a reasonable choice, then I'm going to support it.
5. I prefer email to telephone conversations.*  I like in-person communications, too.  I've just never been much of a "phone" person; phone conversations make me antsy.  I think that texting is brilliant as a communications medium.  (Note to students:  I don't think that texting professors is a good way to communicate.)
6. I believe that meetings should have a purpose beyond presenting data.  Meetings are for brainstorming or for making decisions (or for keeping me from making a dumb mistake--see point #1 above).  I'm not a fan of folks going around the room in a meeting to tell me what they're doing.  That information is for day-to-day, talk in the hall stuff.
7. One of the things that I've loved about my colleagues this year is that everyone in the administrative suite recognizes that we're all on the same team, and there's not one complainer in the bunch.  Everyone here is busy.  Everyone here is trying hard.  Everyone here is overworked.  And yet, each morning, people come in cheerful, with their sleeves rolled up.  It just doesn't get better than that.

 Part of me wonders what would happen if I asked the folks with whom I worked to come up with their list of what I'm really like.  Hmmm....


__________
* Except with my friends and relatives.  I love hearing their voices.

Two new must-reads dealing with corporate law.

I'm recommending two articles, both because I appreciate their points of view and because I respect the authors.

The first one is by Jay Krishnan, and it's called Peel-Off Lawyers: Legal Professionals in India's Corporate Law Firm Sector. 

The second one is by Elias George, and it's Using Game Theory and Contractarianism to Reform Corporate Governance: Why Shareholders Should Seek Disincentive Schemes in Executive Compensation Plans. 

I think you'll enjoy them both.

Thanks, Legal Ethics Forum!

Sure did appreciate this post. 

This article tickled the heck out of me.

Especially the observations about academia--see here.

Who can't love an op-ed piece about corporate greed that refers to Nozick?

See the Financial Times piece by John Kay here.

Why I could be a good director of a public company.

Today's WSJ offers some thoughts on why there aren't more female directors (here).  As I say over at one of my other blogs (here), there are some frustrating implications of that issue.  But here's why I might be useful to some companies:

1. I've actually run two organizations.  They were both educational institutions (I served as the dean of two law schools, the University of Nebraska College of Law and the University of Houston Law Center), not for-profit public companies, but I do have more than an inkling of the challenges facing companies that have to juggle changes in demand and tight workforce restrictions.)
2. I study the behavior of organizations.  OK, I'm usually studying them because they're dysfunctional, but still, I am paying attention to how humans behave in organizations.
3. I study ethics.
4. I understand companies that have to operate in tough financial circumstances.  That doesn't mean that I'm interested only in companies that have filed or are considering filing for bankruptcy protection, but it's fair to say that I could be useful for those types of companies.*

So if you know a company that's looking for more women, and you're comfortable suggesting me as a candidate, I'm interested in talking.

* Of course, if Disney's board ever comes calling, I've loved that company since, well, I was a kid.

WSJ's "Report on the Recent Piggybanking Crisis"

Here.  Classic.

We don't learn. Maybe we can't.

Today's WSJ article about the Olympus scandal (here) proves that we haven't learned anything, really, about avoiding corporate scandals.  Why?  Here are some possibilities:

__ People are inherently evil. 

Nah.  There are good people, and there are evil people.  But most of us fall somewhere in the middle, and it's the situations that we find ourselves in that will push us toward either good behavior or bad behavior.  So I have to reject that gloomy "people are just evil" explanation.

__ Smart people think that they can fix mistakes by covering them up.

Yep.  Ever since Watergate, we've known that the mistakes aren't nearly as bad for us as the cover-ups are, but we keep making the same "let's cover things up" mistake.  Heck, Vegas and other gaming centers are based on the idea that folks will chase their losses until they win again (and they usually don't win again).  But smart people keep thinking that they can outsmart the system, and that they won't get caught.  Will we learn from our mistakes? 

Based on the empirical data, I'm thinking that we won't.  (But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try.)

Yep, Enron's bankruptcy began 10 years ago.

See Loren Steffy's column here for a good perspective.

Enron in retrospective.

BBC Radio 5 Live's Wake Up To Money asked me a bit about Enron, 10 years later (interview starts around minute 27:30), or click here.

My Dad and my buddy Gus Schill pointed me to the Houston Chronicle's Enron retrospective:  see here, here, and Fuel Fix's compilation, here.  Some of my takes are here, here (Colin Marks and I wrote this one), here, and here.  And the books that Bala Dharan, Jeff (yep, my Jeff) Van Niel, and I did:  here and here.

Short version of my take on things, 10 years later?  Two things:  those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and humans don't seem to be able to learn from history, at least where their own cognition is concerned.

Why I love Steve Lubben's work, part n.

See his two recent Dealbook columns, linked in this post at Credit Slips.

Giving kudos (and buying ice cream) for 'fessing up to mistakes.

I've been meaning to post a link to this New York Times story about how to encourage learning from mistakes (here) for a while.  The gist is that it's better to bring mistakes out into the open and treat them as a learning opportunity (by having the mistake-maker buy ice cream for everyone) than it is to yell at the mistake-maker in private.  I love that idea.  It lessens the angst from having made a mistake and acknowledges the mistake in a positive way.

Let's keep watching the Gupta insider trading case.

Today's Wall Street Journal describes the nuanced issues in this case (here).

My take?  As long as boards are composed of people who frequently work with each other and who have more similarities than differences, there's no one there equipped to ask "why are we doing this?"  Without someone asking the questions, there's no reason for boards to change behavior.

Enron rap--a new classic.

Hat tip to Jackie Benson (who happens to be exceptionally smart, talented, and fun to know) and Above the Law.  You can listen to it here.  Click on Daniel Sokol's blog (here) for the text of the full rap.

Failure can be a very, very good thing.

See here.

Two good Wall Street Journal op-eds about Steve Jobs.

See here and here.