Fair Trade News

100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics

Q4 Issue | Ethisphere Magazine

These days, sustainability and responsibility are no small matter. However, ethical action - whether performed by large corporations or small, local non-profits - is not something that just happens; it’s brought on by inspired individuals. In honor of the approaching New Year, we decided to bring together the forerunners of the business ethics world from the past year, wrapped together in a tidy 1 to 100 ranking.

In order to come up with a list of nominees for the list, we reached out to a group of experts from major universities and institutions in order to assemble an advisory panel. With their collective expertise, and the help of a working group of Ethisphere editors, reporters and fact checkers (and after much heated and lengthy debate), we assembled the names of hundreds of nominees, and chiseled it down to a finely honed list of 100. The experts that weighed in on this story all belong somewhere near the top of the list in their own right but, unfortunately, they can’t be. Those were the rules.

Finally, we broke down all of the winners into nine core categories:

Government and Regulatory - Did the individual impact government rules or enforcement trends?

Business Leadership - Did the individual substantially transform a specific business’ operational practices consistent with profitable ethical leadership, forcing competitors to follow suit or fall behind?

Non-Government Organization (NGO) - Did the individual impact a company’s (or industry’s) practices through external, non-regulatory leadership either through positive collaboration or negative publicity for a positive end?

Design and Sustainability - Did the individual substantially contribute to or lead a product or service redesign, which resulted in less natural resource use, or increased consumer acceptance of sustainability without diminishing the quality of the original product or service?

Media and Whistleblowers - Did the individual raise awareness on a critical issue or expose corruption?

Thought Leadership - Did the individual conceive of new approaches or otherwise materially contribute to the field of business ethics theory in a way that could be easily applied by corporate leaders?

Corporate Culture - Did the individual show success to transforming the ethical culture and behavior of a corporation or institution, particularly if such corporation or institution previously had a less than ethical culture and values system?

Investment and Research - Did the individual impact corporate behavior through influencing investor decisions and the deployment of investment capital due to research or institutional fund management practices?

Legal and Governance - Did the individual impact any legal cases which set the precedents in corporate compliance, or influence trends or structure in effective corporate governance for public and/or private companies?

You may not agree with the politics, methods or actions of all of the people on the 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics for 2007. In fact you probably don’t. However, the bottom line is that all of these people influenced business ethics and resulting business behavior over the course of the year, whether that be influencing customers to demand ‘greener products’ from companies, to requiring greater disclosure by corporations about product safety, to forcing companies to look at their anti-bribery or anti-competitive compliance programs. All were influential somehow.

Now, without further ado, we present to you 2007’s 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics:

*For in-depth commentary and individual break downs on why each individual made the list, please refer to the Q4 edition of Ethisphere Magazine, released in December, 2007.

Advisory Panel:

The following individuals offered their knowledge and expertise on business ethics to lend a hand in constructing this list.

Ronald Berenbeim
Principal Researcher, Business Ethics
The Conference Board

John Dienhart
Frank Shrontz Chair for Business Ethics and Professor of Management
Seattle University

Cristián del Campo
Director, Business and Economics Ethics Program
Alberto Hurtado University

Charles Elson
Edgar S. Woolard, Jr., Chair in Corporate Governance
University of Delaware

Paul Fiorelli
Director, Williams College of Business Center for Business Ethics and Social Responsibility
Xavier University

Marianne Jennings
Professor of Legal and Ethical Studies, W.P. Carey School of Business
Arizona State University

Brian Moriarty
Associate Director for Communications
Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics

Paul Moxey
Head of Corporate Governance and Risk Management
Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA)

Hans Schöllhammer
Professor, Anderson School of Management
UCLA

Buie Seawell
Louis B. Beaumont Professor of Business Education, The Daniels College of Business
University of Denver

Jeffrey Seglin
Associate Professor of Writing, Literature & Publishing
Emerson College

Linda Trevino
Professor of Organizational Behavior, Cook Fellow in Business Ethics, Smeal College of Business
Pennsylvania State University