There’s a new TV commercial making the rounds.  It shows a large group of fire fighters assembled in a room that looks much like the House of Representatives. The House speaker is a fireman, and the man at the podium is a fire chief.  The speaker gavels the group to order and the chief speaks. “Alright, firefighters settle down,” the...

Matt Sanchez left Santa Barbara only twice – once when he joined the Marines, the other, when he went to prison. In 1987, as the leader of the Eastside Hoods, Matt called the heads of the area’s other twelve gangs together. After several shootings, he wanted to put an end to the violence. The peace treaty lasted for five years....

Former WorldCom auditor Cynthia Cooper continues a conversation about the ethical downfall of the telecom giant in her new book, “Extraordinary Circumstances.” What caused employees at WorldCom to become complicit with the fraud? “Most people don’t wake up and say – I want to become a criminal today. Instead, they venture down a slippery slope one step at a time....

The day Cynthia Cooper’s life changed she was sitting in a hair salon wrapped in tin-foil when she received an angry call from her boss, WorldCom’s Chief Financial Officer Scott Sullivan As head of internal audit for the telecom giant, Cooper had asked the company’s external auditor, Arthur Andersen about a questionable accounting maneuver.  Sullivan was incensed that she was...

In his book, “A Higher Standard of Leadership” Keshavan Nair writes, “Today, many people believe that it is not possible to be successful in the world of business and politics and still to maintain one’s integrity – integrity not defined by absence of financial corruption, but by adherence to moral principles in all activities. “The standard of leadership depends not...