Corruption

The London Metal Exchange (LME) has ordered Goldman Sachs, which owns a massively controversial 19-building metals warehouse in Detroit, to boost the rate at which it delivers metals for physical transfer.

The titans of international soccer are used to pampering. Motorcades. Police escorts. Five-star hotels. Lavish dinners. Cash allowances of $500 a day, and an additional $250 for their wives or girlfriends.

Honorary fees top $50 million over past two years

Maybe it’s time to do away with corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Not merely the words and the idea but the infrastructure: CSR departments, CSR reports, CSR conferences and CSR executives.

In 1995, I published a book called The World After Communism. Today, I wonder whether there will be a world after capitalism.

The game is up for Rupert Murdoch. The head of News Corp has held sway over Britain’s media industry for a generation. Prime ministers have feared and feted him. He has outwitted regulators and outgunned rivals. Now, suddenly, it is all unraveling. The media mogul has lost his touch. These things happen.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp, has strongly backed Rebekah Brooks, the executive at the centre of a phone-hacking scandal, even as he denounced the “deplorable and unacceptable” behaviour at the News of the World.

Over the July 4 holiday in the U.S., the Fox News Twitter account was attacked by hackers who left six tweets saying that President Obama had been shot to death in Iowa. Apple was also attacked over the weekend with a tweet directing readers to a list of user names and encrypted passwords from the Apple Business Intelligence web site. Citibank, Sony and even the CIA have also suffered data breaches in recent months, drawing renewed attention to cyber security and accelerating policy debate on how to protect critical information from hackers.

An NYT media column by David Carr reviews former L.A. Times editor James O’Shea's new book “The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers.”

The book focuses largely on the deal that lead to Sam Zell's disastrous takeover of the Tribune Company -- which owned the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times among many others and is now in bankruptcy -- in 2007.  

I recently spent a few days at the Harvard Business School with a group of Deans and Professors from around the globe. The event was a symposium that HBS has run for several years, as a way of reflecting on and improving the field of leadership at a macro level.

The focus of this year's event was "values." The sticky issue of ethics, of the responsibility business leaders have to "do the right thing."