(Today continues a conversation initiated last Thursday and added to yesterday.)
Everybody lies about sex. Those who aren’t getting any say they are and those who are getting it where they shouldn’t deny it.
Governor Mark Sanford followed the same path of Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Rudy Giuliani, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Helen Chenoweth (the first woman) and many more.
But you know what?
I don’t care. At least, not about the sex—or even the lies. Even the lies under oath, because I don’t believe that an oath is going to change someone’s attitude about admitting something they don’t want …read more

Thursday I wrote about today’s excessive hypocrisy using, among other examples, Senator John Ensign.
Like most bloggers, I post ahead, so that I wasn’t able to include South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.
Today I want to offer up some quotes from him and tomorrow I’m going to address the subjects brought up by Dan Erwin and Becky Robinson in the comments on Thursday’s post.
“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His [Livingston] situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. …read more

Today is National Honesty Day. Look it up and you’ll find lot of talk about being honest today.
You’d think people could manage one honest day a year, but it’s doubtful they actually will.
These days honesty seems to be more a matter of convenience, i.e., telling the truth when it doesn’t get in the way to whatever the agenda is, or bending the truth to further whatever—and it gets more acceptable every day.
In schools, honesty is considered quaint.
And it’s a global problem, “A 2006 study of cheating among US graduates, published in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found …read more

“The real character of the person can be known by what he does when nobody is watching. … Feudal culture is one where there is one set of rules for the king and another set of rules for the rest of the people. … What we are seeing is not the failure of entrepreneurship. It is the greed, ego and vanity of some super managers of some large corporations. That is not the essence of capitalism. Capitalism is all about creating an environment where individuals can leverage their innovation and their entrepreneurial abilities to create better and better opportunities.” –N.R. …read more

Are there any basic attitudes that you can build into your company’s culture that will encourage, let alone mandate, ethical/moral behavior in the decision making process when ‘moral’ equates to risk?
“…moral dilemmas, the decision to tell the truth or to bury it entails a huge amount of risk and soul-searching. Viewed in that way, what we call “ethics” is really a set of decisions about which risk is easier to sleep with at night: opening up about an uncertain situation or trying to hide the worst of it from yourself and everyone else.”
There are three traits that must be deeply …read more

According to Donald McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, “95 percent of high school students say they’ve cheated during the course of their education, ranging from letting somebody copy their homework to test-cheating. There’s a fair amount of cheating going on, and students aren’t all that concerned about it.”
“The professor has been surveying cheating practices among college kids for 18 years and high school students for six years. He says he’s surveyed 24,000 high school students in 70,000 high schools, grades 9 to 12. His findings? Sixty-four percent of students report one or more instances …read more

Usually I only offer up one link when the reading is heavy, but today I have two.
The first is a book I read about on Expert CEO.
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer is an exploration of “the neural machinery behind our decision-making processes: a network of dopamine-sensitive cells in the brain’s emotional and cognitive centers, which tie feelings and reason together so closely that the two operate almost as one. According to Lehrer, correct decisions require an awareness of both halves of the equation — and a perfect balance of visceral response and cognitive knowledge.”
I’m so far behind on …read more