As instances of business malefaction pile up — Enron, Madoff, Goldman Sachs, A.I.G., Toyota, BP, and we're just clearing our throats with that lineup — the concept of corporate responsibility has acquired the sour air of an oxymoron for many people.
At the same time, the instances of business rewarding racism or profiting from racism -- from slavery and colonialism to redlining and ghetto pricing -- are so plentiful and familiar that the idea of markets as an inexorable antiracist force has never really been taken seriously by the public.
The isolated instances of business failure over the course of decades and thousands of transactions or being the CEO of a public company whose business failures have wiped out billions of dollars of market capitalization and eviscerated at worst, dented at best, the investment portfolios of pension funds and retirement accounts of millions of Americans?
The lower court sided with the couple, asserting that the case represented a straightforward instance of a business discriminating against gay people, which is prohibited under Colorado law.
During a summer session at Harvard, he explained, a professor analyzed the war on drugs as an instance of huge business failure, not unlike the airline and auto industries of a few years ago.
CarOrder.com, for instance, went out of business in 2000 after burning through a $100 million investment from its original parent, Trilogy Development Group.
In many instances, a "business of business is business" outlook has blinded companies to outcomes (or shifts in their implicit "social contract") which often could have been anticipated.Just as important, these outcomes have posed not just risks to companies, but also have generated value-creation opportunities.
The worst outcome of all would be for the children to be used as weapons by warring divorce lawyers – with in this instance of course the business communities on both sides being the kids.
If you watch it now, what you see is a classic instance of a show business professional, seemingly unfazed, faking her way through a disaster with poise and ingenuity.
