Business Ethics

Save the Patient. Make Exorbitant Profits. Is This Okay?

April 15, 2013

How do you feel about projecting excessive profitability in a health care business plan? Over the weekend I saw the pitch for a brilliant business plan, with great technology, for developing medical electronics that could significantly reduce some kinds of complications in some kinds of surgeries. “The world needs this,” I thought. “I hope these [...]

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Sticky Questions on Startup Ownership and Buy-Sell

November 27, 2012

I received this interesting detailed question from the ask me form on my website. I’ve decided to answer it here. I think my answer might be useful for others with similar questions. I’m putting the question in quotes, paragraph by paragraph, and adding my response directly where it comes in the question.  It starts like [...]

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Go Ahead, Search Me … and Give Me Better Info

August 2, 2012

What bothers me isn’t that Orbitz steers Mac users to pricier hotels, as WSJ.com reports; it’s that some people act like that’s somehow illegitimate, unfair, or deceptive. I say, on the contrary, give people what they like.  Not everybody wants the cheapest hotel available. Many people prefer paying a bit more for something better. And [...]

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Did They Copy Your Idea? Deal With It.

July 6, 2012

This troubles me. App Developer Says Facebook Stole Idea for “Find Friends Nearby”. I don’t know the app, haven’t used it, and I’m not a lawyer, but I hate it when people complain about some big company stealing their ideas. Ideas get copied all the time. Have you seen the web? Have you seen books, [...]

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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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