I recently spent 20 minutes with one remarkable individual after the next as fellow judges and I assessed finalists in SAICA’s Top 35-Under-35 chartered accountants for 2017. Though varying evaluation criteria guided the process, one metric stood out for me: integrity. I often reflect on the challenges facing South Africa’s leadership at present and the…
THE FUTURE OF ETHICS ETHICS & CORPORATE GOVERNANCE DEFINITION OF ‘ETHICS’ DECONSTRUCTED COMMERCE WITHOUT MORALITY THE FUTURE OF ETHICS The novelist Elie Wiesel once said that there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The accounting profession needs to stand…
Teaching is depressing. Every year, my baldness spreads, my bones calcify, my ear-hair sprouts, and every year, the students walk into class exactly the same age as they were the year before. The other day, a female student waited for everyone else to leave after class, and then told me sweetly that she had a…
I am a hypocrite. In their first-ever lecture in Accounts 1, I ask students to tell me the objective of business, a key question in introducing concepts such as net asset value and profit. The answer I am looking for is, of course: “to make the owners wealthier”. I usually make fun of anyone that…
In the longstanding lecturers’ tradition of using imagined names that only the lecturer thinks are funny, I recently asked my students why it is wrong for Mr Tickenbash CA(SA) to provide assurance services to a company where he is a non-executive director. In the longstanding students’ tradition of giving an answer that only the student…
Who was it that said “the first step to wisdom is admitting what you don’t know”? I really have no idea – and of course I feel wiser for saying so – but I do wish that this old chestnut could be more commonly observed in business. I am often amazed at how a few…
WHY BE ETHICAL? Sometimes, I am tempted to lie to my students. Well, not “lie”, exactly. More like “not disclose material facts”. I see the irony in deceiving a class of ethics students, but, hell, if some of them can plagiarise their essays, can’t I leave out some inconvenient truths in order to get the…