It was an absolute pleasure to speak to the graduating class of the Executive MBA program at the University of Texas at Dallas recently. Students in this highly ranked program have an average of seventeen years of work experience in industry before earning their coveted EMBA graduate degree.
The students I addressed were taking Professor Diane McNulty’s class, Current Trends in Board Governance. I spoke about the importance of ethics in the corporate environment and many of the lessons to be learned from my experience at Citigroup, which was the largest bank in the world going into the 2008 financial crisis.
We discussed how the lack of ethics at Citigroup and the other large banks caused the massive frauds which led to the financial crisis, with our government then covering up the true fraudulent behavior and bailing out the banks at the ultimate cost of trillions of dollars.
We also had a lively discussion about research identifying how one can determine if a corporate culture is an ethical corporate culture, with many of the students sharing their own stories of dealing with questionable behavior in their own companies.
Additional discussion centered on the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), calculated annually by Transparency International, which ranks the 180 countries of the world from most ethical to least ethical. This most current CPI listing shows that the United States, ranked #24, continues to slip in the rankings, with 23 countries of the world reflecting less corruption than the USA.
The in-depth interaction with these students reflected their significant work experience and showed their personal understanding of the importance that ethics play in the workplace and the extreme costs that unethical behavior can cause.
Richard Bowen is widely known as the Citigroup whistleblower. As Business Chief Underwriter for Citigroup during the housing bubble financial crisis meltdown, he repeatedly warned Citi executive management and the board about fraudulent behavior within the organization. The company certified poor mortgages as quality mortgages and sold them to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other investors.
