What's Up, SEC?

The release date of my dad's book is just around the corner. The book's content very much applies to my current studies here at the Johnson School, and the intersection of its release and my life is, at the very least, well-timed.

I'm taking a course this semester called "Ethics and Corporate Culture," which is co-taught between the Business School and the Law School. Interestingly, ethics is a topic that law schools teach more effusively than business schools, although I doubt anyone could come up with a correlation to the ethical standards among graduates. In fact, when lawyers or business people do very bad things, most schools seem to simply throw up their hands, putting the distance of time between themselves and the perpetrators.

My dad's book The King Rat and His Court: Lessons in Corporate Greed, doesn't let anyone off the hook, except the honest, hardworking employee and shareholder. In addition to exposing the rats, the book calls to mind many of the inherent contradictions that MBAs and law students alike must grapple with in today's corporate milieu. Here are a few that are on my mind:

• Free market capitalism is highly effective, but only coupled with integrity, respect for others, and a sense that actions, and risks, have consequences. As our finance professor used to say over and over, "there is no free lunch"...to be sure, if there is, then the free market is broken.
• While profit seeking and greed have very different connotations, they are almost certainly shackled together, and the rare individual holds the key to separate them. All MBAs seek profits, for themselves, their firms, and the various stakeholders in their lives, but are all MBAs greedy?
• Finally, if business is all about arbitrage--or more generally, finding and creating new opportunities for profit--then surely business is about shifting the market away from equilibrium, giving one player or a group of players an advantage, or taking from one to feed another. Thus, businesses engage in price gouging, monopolizing, lobbying, and strangling the competition. What's up, SEC?

Hopefully my dad's book will put some of these issues to rest...or at least spark more questions. I'll be sure to let you know when it's available on Amazon.