Business Ethics

Is This Mad Men Then or Silicon Valley Now?

May 4, 2012

A lot has happened during my lifetime to give women more and better choices. What you see in the TV drama Mad Men about how hard the business world was for women, back then, is what I remember from those times. So there has been progress. But damn, let’s not confuse progress towards equality with [...]

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Slow and Steady Decline of Trust

April 5, 2012

This trend really bothers me. Even after the FCC rules on blogging and disclosure, I still get regular offers like this one that was in my email this morning. It was a nicely worded email, with some flattery, but here’s the meat: I’d love to put together a high-quality article written specifically for the site. There [...]

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Facebook Needs at Least One Woman on Its Board

April 2, 2012

(Note: I posted this earlier today on the Huffington Post. I’m reposting it here because this is my main blog, and I believe what I wrote, so I want it here too.) Why would a startup as important as Facebook, run by somebody as young as Mark Zuckerberg, whose users are more than 50 percent [...]

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User Interface Dark Side: When Deception Works

November 17, 2011

No ambiguity with this one: the site is named darkpatterns.org… a pattern library with the specific goal of naming and shaming deceptive user interfaces (aka “dark patterns”) and the companies that use them. … and author Harry Brignull, in his List Apart post Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design, calls them “evil web [...]

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On the Recruiting Value of Slogans and Bluster — Not

November 14, 2011

Is this just me? The message says “looking for ball busting MBAs to join my firm. (no wimps) great opportunity to kick tail in renewable energy.” Does that make you shudder? It reminds me of big-company sales mentality where quality is measured by bravado and the customer is a tool to be conquered. It smacks [...]

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New Game: Social Media Snooping vs. Social Media Cleansing

July 13, 2011

The other shoe dropping: Business Insider posted This Company Will Expose All Your Most Embarrassing Online Moments a few days ago. It’s about a service company that helps employers by doing a social-media online background check on a potential employee. It was more than two years ago that I first saw a business plan for [...]

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Those Sad Stories of Elephants and Mice in Startups and High Tech

June 14, 2011

Big squashes little. The elephant steps on a mouse and kills it, but never even notices. We stop on ants on the sidewalk without realizing. You can probably think of a lot of these cases. I had a friend who rode a big wave in the late 1980s with a PC-compatible add-on board that enabled [...]

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True Story: Why I Lied to You When You Called

April 7, 2011

I’m a bit embarrassed about this story. It’s about lying. You’ll see if you read on that it wasn’t bad lying, not tricking anybody for any bad reason. But it’s a true story, so I’m posting it here because 1.) it might be useful to somebody; and 2.) I’m curious about how often it happens. [...]

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Charting the Lesson of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Appeal

November 30, 2010

Yesterday I posted here David McCandless’ fascinating 18-minute talk on data visualization, in which he puts up charts and graphs as a window into patterns and relationships in numbers. Watching that talk led me to discover his Information is Beautiful blog, which is a great source of ideas and insights. For example, the chart shown [...]

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One Real Case: Does Fake Buzz Work? Do Fake Reviews Work?

September 17, 2010

Annoying, yes, but does it work? We all assume spam works because it keeps on coming, right? What about putting fake comments on blogs, faking reviews at amazon.com and elsewhere? We all hate those tactics when we see them, but the real question for today is whether or not those tactics actually work. Are the [...]

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