When was the last time you faced an ethical dilemma at work? And what did you do about it? As a CIMA member or student you are obliged to take action. To do so you should ensure you are familiar with the Code of Ethics, which helps guides you to do the right thing.

In Rebecca’s recent blog she highlighted how some candidates seem ethically challenged.

At the launch of the Joint Venture between the AICPA and CIMA last week, Ethics and Sustainability were high on the agenda – get ahead with the new edition of Ethical lens, CIMA’s ethics newsletter.

At the CIMA & Tomorrow’s company event last week the theme was Leading with Integrity: engaging hearts as well as minds.  As part of the Tomorrow’s Values series the session explored how employees align with a company’s values.   Values and trust are evidenced by people and their behaviours - not just by tickboxing around rules and policies – although such regulations are important in framing the environment and creating the push…..

If a “wrong doing” in your organisation came to light, would it be a road-bump, in which management would quickly figure where things had gone wrong and put corrective action into place straight away, drawing lessons for the better running of the organisation in the future? 

The irony is not lost on many that the current ethical scandal that is fuelling global media, the story making front pages around the world and clogging all that is cyber, is indeed about the media itself.  The story is the story. And the story is of ethics.

The News of the World (NoW) the most profitable UK Sunday newspaper with the highest circulation and  known as the most read paper in the English language was dramatically closed yesterday by News International.

Over a rainy London weekend I caught up on some reading, including dipping in and out of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book What the Dog Saw, a collection of his New Yorker essays from the last several years.  It seems even relaxing at home I am never far from business ethics, as one of the pieces, The Formula from 2007, focuses on the Enron collapse in a section looking at “flawed ways of thinking”. It may be old news, but the story remains instructive.

Last week I was moonlighting, facilitating training in participation techniques for management and education professionals.  These individuals, amongst them a financial director currently working for a small UK manufacturing company, were about to embark on assignments far removed from their current day to day.

One result of the credit crunch, as Gillian Tett has recently written in the FT Weekend, has been a “celebrity” focus on the crisis and the ethical shortcomings.

With the change in UK government in May this year,  many were wondering how the new coalition would deal with the UK Bribery Act which was passed into law in April.  Bribery and corruption are very costly for business – adding an estimated 10%

Here in the United Kingdom, there has been a major shake-up of the City, as revealed on Tuesday night by the new Chancellor George Osborne.

Yesterday The Guardian reported that the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust had sold its £1.9m stake in Vedanta Resources, citing the company’s ‘morally indefensible’ behaviour in Orissa, India, as the reason for divesting.

It feels like I’ve hardly been in the office this month, and when I’ve been there it has been more in mind than in spirit. More about that later...

Last week started with a trip down to London for a Kings Fund event as part of our ‘Experiential Learning’ program. Over two days, we learnt about Social Enterprise. Then we had to come up with an idea for a venture of our own and pitch it to the room.

I wrote in my last blog about the current furore over accusations that MBA programmes lack of ethical content and code may have contributed to the current economic crisis.

Whatever your views on the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, it certainly hasn't produced a clear political direction on how to respond to global warming whether that's man-made, part of the natural planetary cycle, or simply a marketing strategy to fund Al Gore's next election campaign. So does that mean it's up to us now?

CIMA HQ has joined the 10:10 initiative - a campaign for organisations and individuals to pledge to reduce their carbon footprint by 10% in one year, led by the people behind the recent movie 'The Age of Stupid'.

Last year, CIMA convened a group of experts to debate the role of ethics in business. Now that we are in a recession, do you think ethics will be the first casualty of the economic downturn?