Came across an interesting article in TreeHugger about the UNDP paying Ecuador up to $3.6B not to develop a specific oil field. In my mind the interesting thing this does is set another price-point that can be used to help estimate the total cost of ... [Continue Reading]
Paying for externalities?
Great article here from Chris McDonald's business ethic blog about companies voluntarily paying for externalities and how this should be interpreted -- as hush money or doing the right thing... The basic idea is, I believe, sound (no pun intended if ... [Continue Reading]
Johnson & Johnson and the 1982 Tylenol murders
As I was scanning through some of Andrew Winston's previous blog entries at HBR, I came across this one that I thought had some interesting take-aways relevant to the Business Detox Project. The specific "lesson" that I was intrigued by was labeled ... [Continue Reading]
How to detoxify your business
If you buy into the concept that business is -- by design and structure -- an inherently "toxic machine", then one question that has to be asked is.... How would one go about truly detoxifying their business? While a fundamental belief of this ... [Continue Reading]
Deregulation: it’s not the “easy” answer…
A recent article from George Monbiot over at the Guardian examines the role of government and regulation in the market and looks at the new announcement coming from the UK Health Secretary regarding "streamlining regulation" in the food industry. ... [Continue Reading]
BP: When a “wake-up call” probably isn’t
There is lots of discussion about how the current BP Gulf of Mexico situation is a "wake up call" for the government and for Big Oil. We said the same thing about the banks and the global economic meltdown of 2007/08. It is not that I don't think ... [Continue Reading]
More on the BP disaster
Just posted this comment to the Economist, after reading the latest article on the BP disaster and the mounting costs. The article is here; here is my posted comment: ... [Continue Reading]
Business reform, not (just) bank reform
Now that the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 is starting to shrink away in our rear-view mirror, all the talk through the US, the EU, the G20, and various other camps is centered on "bank reform". Whether we're talking about new taxes on them, ... [Continue Reading]
Labour unrest… in China
A couple of news items struck me as note-worthy over the past couple of days. One was the rash of suicides at the Foxcomm plant in China (where they make iPhones for Apple), and the other was the recent strike by Honda workers in China over their ... [Continue Reading]
Costs, the Market, and BP
One of my major beliefs (and the rationale behind much of the philosophy of the Business Detox Project) is that the world would be a much better place if we worked to price "externalities" into our market transactions. The current fiasco that is ... [Continue Reading]
