|
Caux Round Table Elects New Officers
The Global Governing Board of the Caux Round Table on January 20th, 2010, elected Dr. Noel Purcell of Sydney, Australia, as the next Chair of the Caux Round Table for a 2 year term.
Prior to retiring from executive life, Dr. Purcell was Westpac Banking Corporation’s Group General Manager, Stakeholder Communications, with responsibility for all media, government, investor and community relations, as well as the Westpac Group corporate reputation and internal communication. In this role, Dr. Purcell led Westpac’s corporate responsibility initiatives, which have resulted in Westpac being widely recognised as a global leader in sustainable business practices. His leadership in CSR was globally recognized when he was included in Ethical Corporation’s Best of the Best as one of the top 15 ethical leaders globally in 2007.
Noel joined Westpac in February 1986, and has served in senior executive institutional banking, marketing, communications, retail financial services, and group planning roles, including as General Manager for Japan and North Asia from 1992 to 1996. Prior to Westpac, Noel served at the senior executive level within the Federal Public Service, including the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Office of National Assessments, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Noel gained his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1979. Earlier tertiary qualifications included an M.Sc. from the University of Michigan, a B.Ec. from the Australian National University, and a B.Sc. (Hons.) from the University of New England. Noel also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard University in 1992.
Immediate past Chair, Lord Daniel Brennan of London, England, will become Chair Emeritus of the Caux Round Table.
Mr. Douglas Hepper, CEO of Vision Ease, was elected Vice-Chair for the Americas; Ms Claire Chiang, Senior Vice President of Banyan Tree Holdings, Singapore, was elected Vice-Chair for Asia; and Mr. Frank Straub, Chairman of BLANCO in Germany, was elected Vice-Chair for Europe.
Members of the Global Governing Board for 2010 are: Dr. Noel Purcell, Doug Hepper, Claire Chiang, Frank Straub, Hironori Yano, Simon Sproule, Karel Noordzy, and Steve Young.
 Wise Recommendations for Better Corporate Governance
The Committee for Economic Development in Washington, DC, has released a set of recommendations for better corporate governance proposed by Ben Heineman, former Senior Vice President-General Counsel of GE, and now a scholar in residence at the Harvard Law School. This statement is a high cut above recent recommendations coming in the wake of the 2008 collapse of credit markets.
Many talk about the need for American business to regain public trust, but this set of recommendations is an actual plan. It can work. It’s based on values – stewardship and responsibility – and knows how the right values can be grown inside a corporation.
The CED has given us an action agenda to improve American capitalism. The Caux Round Table fully supports the proposal.
To read the recommendations, please click here.
Proceedings of the Caux Round Table's First Southeast Asia Dialogue.
The proceedings of our first Southeast Asia Dialogue are now complete. The Round Table was held in Bangkok last August. We are most grateful to Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya for hosting the round table at the Ministry, Khun Nick Pisalyaput, Director of CRT Thailand, for his thorough and thoughtful arrangements making the Round Table a success, to the Tunku Abdul Aziz, our CRT Coordinator for Southeast Asia, for chairing the meeting, and to Professor Ian Fenwick of the SASIN Graduate School for drafting the proceedings.
Attached to the proceedings are some very instructive documents which are most difficult to locate: a discussion of the Rajadhamma, or 10 ethical principles for leadership derived from Theravada Buddhist ethics, and presentations of the Sufficiency Economy concept. This concept, suggested in Thailand by His Majesty, is an approach to CSR based on Theravada approaches to living a sustainable and balanced life within the many faceted karmic cycles of good and bad actions.
The Sufficiency Economy approach deserves special attention in our mind because so much of the thinking around CSR has grown out of Euro-American moral and intellectual constructs and traditions. A set of Theravada recommendations deserves consideration as a contribution to the emergence of a truly global approach to CSR.
The Round Table also presented to Thai opinion leaders prior CRT work on understanding Qur'anic guidance for good governance. Leading Muslim theologians from South Thailand participated in a path-opening discussion of really quite similar Theravada and Qur'anic approaches to responsibility and justice. This dialogue between Theravada and Qur'anic ethical approaches was of particular constructive relevance given the continuing unrest and violence in the Muslim populated provinces in southernmost Thailand.
To view the proceedings, please click here (160 pages, 11MBytes).
Caux Round Table 2009 Global Dialogue Proceedings
We are very pleased to announce that the proceedings of our 2009 Global Dialogue are now complete. We are very grateful for the thoroughness and care which Dr. Lester Myers brought to his task as our Rapporteur. He not only organized the discussions, but provided reference links to other books and sources of importance to most helpfully connect our comments and concerns to the wider world of reporting and analysis. It is these references that give this set of proceedings important "shelf life."
To read the proceedings, please click here.
Lord Skidelsky's Important Remarks at the July Caux Round Table 2009 Global Dialogue.
Our keynote speaker at the July Global Dialogue at Mountain House in Caux, Switzerland, was Lord Robert Skidelsky, author of a three volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, and just recently, a well-received new book entitled Keynes: Return of the Master.
Of Lord Skidelsky's new book, Dwight Garner for the New York Times wrote: "Mr. Skidelsky surveys the vast body of Keynes’s work. But he boils the thinking down to a few essential points. Central among them is that market economies are fundamentally uncertain; large shocks like the recent meltdown are not anomalies but normal if unpredictable events. Government should intervene in a crisis - as the Obama administration has since the fall of Lehman Brothers last year - supplying a judicious but firm hand on the tiller.
Mr. Skidelsky is righteous in his thunder about how Keynes’s ideas have been spurned in recent decades. He scolds the free-market ethos of the Reagan and Thatcher eras as well as the thinking of anti-Keynesian New Classical economists. He does not entirely blame the usual suspects (banks, hedge funds, credit-rating agencies, the Fed) for the current crisis. He indicts laissez-faire philosophy.
“The root cause of the present crisis lies in the intellectual failure of economics,” Mr. Skidelsky writes. “It was the wrong ideas of economists which legitimized the deregulation of finance, and it was the deregulation of finance which led to the credit explosion which collapsed into the credit crunch. It is hard to convey the harm done by the recent dominant school of New Classical economics. Rarely in history can such powerful minds have devoted themselves to such strange ideas.”
To read Lord Skidelsky's remarks, please click here.
The Ethics of Food
We at the Caux Round Table are continually surprised how often and in how many places our Principles for Business turn up. Fundamental ethics seem to be needed everywhere people are in power or make decisions. The field is not a narrow silo but a broad plain or vast ocean, spreading its concern and its guidance far and wide. Recently, we organized a small conference in Minnesota to look at the intersection of ethics and food - the production and distribution of food and the impact of the consumption of food. So many issues turned up but so few are already under the microscope of business ethics advocates and CSR professionals. We very recently submitted commentary with our thoughts on this issue to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The more we thought about it, the ethical issues around food and its impact on our wellbeing and the wellbeing of our planet are of first importance and global in scope. To read the article, please click here.
Caux Round Table Guidelines for Executive Compensation
Aligning executive compensation with long-term value creation and with responsible concern for stakeholders is an essential requirement of a more moral capitalism. The Caux Round Table advocates a set of guidelines for Boards of Directors to follow in setting compensation for senior company officers. To review these guidelines, please click here.
Caux Round Table Fellows Call for New Foundation for Professional Education
The CRT hosted its second annual Academic Retreat for CRT Fellows and other scholars earlier this year in Caux, Switzerland. The concern that emerged in retreat discussions was over the intellectual limitations that seem to have overcome professional education in modern society and turned potential stewards of virtue and values into mere technocrats who sell their skills for whatever they can get. Technocracy, it seems, is not about just ends, but means only and the application of formal logics, data sets, theoretically constrained relationships, and assumption-based algorithms.
Several of our CRT colleagues and Fellows have called for the grounding of professional education in ethical and intellectual fundamentals. Fortunately, as our colleagues point out, humanity has a rich tradition of wisdom literatures on which to draw for such education. Click here to read summary statement.
Global Asset Recovery Initiative to Target Proceeds of Corruption
Caux Round Table Chair Lord Daniel Brennan, QC, proposed in 2006 the flight of wealth from poor and developing countries, money usually obtained immorally or illicitly or sent abroad illegally (so-called "dirty money") retards not only the economic growth of such countries but also their development of more just and accountable political regimes respectful of human rights and democratic norms.
Under CRT leadership, a Steering Committee was formed last year to study and propose the formation of a private-sector organization to seek out, recover and repatriate the proceeds of grand corruption which are "stashed" in wealthy countries, often with the use of secrecy or tax-haven jurisdictions. Tentatively called the Global Asset Recovery Initiative, the entity aims at empowering citizens of developing nations to institute civil asset forfeiture proceedings and other legal measures in order to return stolen wealth to their countries.
In a recent interview, Caux Round Table Global Executive Director Steve Young discussed this new project with Asset Forfeiture Watch. Read full article here ( PDF 124 KB).
2009 Social Capital Achievement Country Rankings
The Caux Round Table recognizes that economic development does not occur independently from social, cultural and political institutions. Wealth creation is not an isolated, autonomous, self-referential process within communities; it is a dependent variable, subordinate to the dictates of prior conditions. Markets are organic phenomena; they grow strong and vibrant only in facilitating environments. The Caux Round Table recognizes this dependence of wealth creation upon surrounding conditions as Kyosei, or dependent co-arising. Read the full 2009 Report here.
OPINION ESSAYS.jpg)
Psychoanalysis - A Challenge to Business Ethics (Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, Caux Round Table). Advocacy of ethics in business and responsible business behavior that takes a long-term view of pricing and other immediate market circumstances presumes the possibility of having good individual character. A concern for consequences to others, along with acts of judgment and self-restraint, reflect a commitment to social values and communal needs. Persons with a low tolerance for the moral sense will often fall short in having such concern and so acting with thoughtful regard for the best interests of others.
Ethics, therefore, presumes some degree of successful socialization in conventional norms offering a vision of the common good. Ethics rejects living by the proverbial law of the jungle where life is “red in tooth and claw”. Read more . . .
New Vatican Encyclical Aligned with the Caux Round Table's Vision and Mission (Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, Caux Round Table). Pope Benedict XVI issued this past July an encyclical on the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on ethical truth as it applies to business, commerce, finance, and economic development - all as steps towards more just societies within our global human family. We at the Caux Round Table were delighted and so very pleased to read where, again and again, the Holy Father's Encyclical aligned with, endorsed, provided grounds for, or promoted some aspect of our Principles for Business or our various statements and initiatives. Since we believe that sound character and good conduct in business is very hard to divorce from our sources of religious faith and deeply personal understandings of life, it is an honor to read that a profound ethical tradition, developed by caring and thoughtful people over many years, provides reassurance that we are not on the wrong track. We've prepared a 5 page analysis of just how closely the Pope's Encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, aligns with our own perspectives. Click here to read the analysis.
Re-issuing a Social License to the Financial Services Industry (Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, Caux Round Table). A trite justification for business ethics and corporate social responsibility has been the assertion that business needs a “social license” from the community in order to prosper. The cost of such a license, it is said, is good behavior towards customers, employees and the community. Without such a license, it is also said, business will meet with obstacles and difficulties. Read more . . .
The Global Financial Crisis One Year On: A Magic Pudding in More Ways than One? (Jack Flanagan, Professor Emeritus of Accounting, University of Notre Dame Australia). In the last year, since the onset of the global financial crisis, we have apparently moved from feelings of despair and anxiety to feelings of hope and renewal – with positive GDP figures, a booming stock market and, despite a rising unemployment rate, a belief that it can be contained. Even junk bond issues have resurfaced. However, all this has a cost. In the preceding year governments of every political persuasion around the world collectively threw about eighteen trillion dollars at solving the GFC problem. From the statements made previously they appear to have succeeded better than they or we could have expected. In Australian idiom, governments have created a magic pudding that just goes on giving. Does this mean that normal transmission will be resumed shortly and we can return to our profligate ways? I think the answer is no, but as we are living through an era of make believe I thought it might be interesting to look at the “Magic Pudding” analogy. Read more . . .
John Maynard Keynes: Speculative Conventions and Reform of Financial Markets (Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, Caux Round Table). As we reflect on last year's meltdown of financial markets one year on, reforming such markets seems to finally be on the rise in political agendas. In reading John Maynard Keynes's complex treatise on employment, interest and money, we were compellingly fascinated by his Chapter 12 on the dysfunctional role of speculative conventions and financial markets in setting the prices of long-term assets. It seems to us that no reform of financial markets can be considered sufficient until a remedy is found for the flaws in market pricing pointed out by Keynes in this chapter. The Caux Round Table has drafted a short essay on the lessons we've learned from reading that chapter of Keynes' General Theory. To read the essay, please click here.
What Has Been Done Since the Collapse of Lehman Brothers? (Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, Caux Round Table). We're just beyond the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which triggered the failure of Wall Street's traditional financial houses and many large financial institutions forcing government bailouts and rescues. In reviewing how the Caux Round Table responded intellectually to the crisis, I think we can say we did well in our recommendations. Sadly, however, needed reforms are still on the policy horizon. The Caux Round Table has drafted a summary of where we are a year later, including the recommendations made by our Global Governing Board a year ago after our Global Dialogue was held in Madrid. Click here to read the summary.
Aristotle on What Went Wrong on Wall Street (Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, Caux Round Table). It's reassuring to find that our musings on great events in our time align with the insights of great minds from the past. We just stumbled, by accident, on comments from Aristotle that preceded, by many centuries, our current concern over the, at times, dysfunctional relationship between financial markets and the real economy. Aristotle's disdain for "money getting" as opposed to "economy" speaks to our challenge in rebooting our global markets for financial intermediation. Click here to read our brief analysis.
Did “Structured Finance” lead to Evasion of Responsible Business Practices? (Jack Flanagan, Professor Emeritus of Accounting, University of Notre Dame Australia). Banking by its very nature should be a moral activity. It interacts with the lives of the vast majority of working people and sets obligations on the parts of both parties to lending or investing activities. There needs to be trust that both parties will uphold their share of the bargain, but what if trust in the banking system fails? In much of the so called Developed World, this is the road we have been travelling down in the recent past although it has been the lack of trust in the system by bankers themselves that has been much in evidence – and they should know. Read more here.
Repairing Capitalism’s Immune System (Dr. Noel Purcell, Principal, Simply Good Business & Vice Chair, Caux Round Table). The future of capitalism has been brutally thrust onto centre stage in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. It’s not so much a question of whether capitalism will survive but a question of in what form. The one thing that became increasingly clear as the world was cast headlong into the global financial crisis was that capitalism’s so called immune system of laissez-faire market discipline simply didn’t work. The very processes needed to counter the excesses and destructive behaviours and to protect the financial system and the economy more broadly simply failed to kick in as the storm clouds gathered. And out the door went the ideology that unrestrained markets are self regulating. Read more here.
Social Capital and Wall Street (Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, Caux Round Table). A very important thesis about how to create the wealth of nations holds that certain cultural preconditions shape the scope and intensity of capitalist success. When these preconditions are in effect, wealth is created; when they are missing, wealth is, relatively speaking, scarce and hard to create. The social nature of capitalism as a system demands an appropriate cultural context. Some values as carried into market and investment behaviors promote robust capitalism; other values don’t. Read more here.
Is there an Agency Problem? (Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, Caux Round Table). I want to call your attention, as we turn from crisis management to building more viable global institutions of financial intermediation, to a sophisticated cynicism that opposes more resolute commitment to business ethics and corporate social responsibility. I am not referring to the common mistrust of private enterprise on the grounds that working for personal profit is inconsistent with securing a greater good for society. This is the perennial tension posed by philosophers and religious leaders between the claims of virtue and the attractions of self-interest. Rather, I am referring to a more academically polished elaboration of that argument which is called “the agency problem.” Read more here.
Moral Capitalism: An Oxymoron or Scientific Possibility? (Professor N. Doran Hunter, Research Fellow, Caux Round Table). When discussing with my colleagues at the university the possibility that science might be on the cusp of declaring that the human brain is hard wired to make moral decisions, a gasp of rational unbelief and theological skepticism fills the room with miasmic laughter and Augustinian bemusement. Wait a minute, you idealistic innocent they say, haven’t you experienced life, followed the stories in the newspapers, read theology and history, and absorbed the philosophers of the Western experience? Yes, I respond, but the advocates of neuroscience and game theory are suggesting, and rather strongly, that there does seem to be in the contemporary human brain a “deep moral structure driving … certain common values … and an intuitive moral sense” that can direct human activity. Read more . . .
Trust Matters - Restoring Confidence in a Time of Crisis (John Dalla Costa, Founder, Centre for Ethical Orientation). When the leaders of the world’s biggest economies met in London for the G-20 summit in April, they pledged to work together on six priorities to deal with the global economic crisis. Acknowledging “the greatest challenge to the world economy in modern times,” the official communiqué specifies cooperation among nations to “restore confidence” and “rebuild trust.” Such are the forces of this economic catastrophe that no country or company can escape the black hole of suspicion. Some of the proposed measures are obvious, including more transparency, better regulation in financial markets, and greater accountability for outcomes. But these in fact are remedies very similar to what was adopted after the “dot-com bust” seven short years ago. The laws and reforms put in place to reverse the widespread mistrust failed miserably in preventing the excesses that led to the current crash in credit and credibility. Read more here.
The Economic Crisis and Ends, Educators, Intentionality and Stakeholders (Dr. Thomas A. Bausch, Professor and former Dean, College of Business Administration, Marquette University). One of the best definitions of economics is as “the science of original sin”. By using that term I reveal my Judeo/Christian heritage, but I would not be surprised if a concept similar to “original sin” exists in most of the major religions of the word. The concept of some basic disorder in human beings captures the concept of scarcity which is core to any definition of economics. Although in no way do I deny resource limits, much of scarcity is facilitated by narcissism, unlimited desire or greed for both money and power, as well as the limited abilities and frailty of the human race that undergird demand and supply leading to opportunities for individuals, groups, institutions and nations to exploit each other. Economists have long argued that only the market system can harness legitimate economic drive and temper human excesses. Read more ...
[Click here to Search for more Opinion Essays]
|
ABOUT CRT
About Caux Round Table
.gif){kind=icon}
.gif){kind=icon}
CRT Seven Point Plan for G20 Leaders
Print
Friendly
Webmaster