Entrepreneurship - Pitt Business - University of Pittsburgh

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as Dr. Brad Agle [Katz/CBA associate
professor of business administration]
likes to say. …
Sharon Allen delivers a keynote address September 19, 2007, in Pitt’s
Bellefield Hall Auditorium.
Today, I would like to share my
perspectives on something that’s
absolutely vital to anyone with an
ambition to lead—specifically, ethics
and values. Through our actions, we
must do everything that we can to ensure
their survival, because judging from
the headlines of the past few years,
the ethics and values that underpin the
world of commerce are coming under
sustained attack.
Ethics—Everyone Is Looking
Every day, or so it seems, we see yet
another story about someone falling
from grace, often because of a lapse in
ethical judgment. The stories can be about
a political leader, a business executive,
an athlete—people well known who
should have known better. Or the stories
can be about total strangers who become
household names overnight for all of the
wrong reasons.
Ethics used to be what you did when no
one was looking, but, as connected as we
are today by the Internet, mobile phones,
BlackBerrys, and the like, when is no one
looking?
Today we live in a world of ethics and
values—one in which each of us has the
opportunity to make decisions good or
bad—decisions whose impact can be
communicated immediately and judged
accordingly.
Allen greets CBA students who participated in a special morning
roundtable discussion.
It may be useful to quickly review the
difference between ethics and compliance.
Compliance embraces the letter of the law.
It sets minimum standards of required
conduct and is the product of a rules-based
mind-set. You can be in full compliance
with a law or regulation—and still toss
and turn all night long.
Ethics is much more. Ethics encompasses
the spirit of the law. It involves broad
principles of behavior. Where compliance
issues can appear as checklists written
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