With the US elections just a few days away and the divisive, negative rhetoric on all sides being at what seems to me to be an all time high, I thought this week it might make sense to take a look at the oft-overlooked virtue-based approach to ethics.
Keith Green, assistant professor at Montclair State and former vice president of B2B communications and partnerships at Guinness World Records, discusses:
1) DEFG: Four common reasons for ethical failures
2) The challenge of living in the world of now
3) Ethics issues he has observed in sports public relations
This week many of the ethics concerns for public relation and communications professionals are about disinformation, misinformation and deepfakes.
Bestselling marketing and CX author, and inspirational speaker Jay Baer discusses the ethics lessons you can learn from beer, football and food.
Specifically:
1) How to ethically work for competing companies
2) The rampant issue of IP Theft
3) Restaurants’ ethical dilemma: COVID disclosure
This week the most interesting ethics content came down to one theme: ideas. From new frameworks for making decisions, to new failures to consider, and new learnings from South Asia, there is something here for anyone interested in ethics.
Todd Van Hoosear, the Chief Engagement Officer for Business Breakthrough Network and a visiting instructor at Boston University, discusses a number of important ethics topics, including:
1) What do ethical PR professionals do when they are faced with conflicting loyalties?
2) The ethics challenges of a post-truth era
3) The need for action to change the perception of PR
As always, I didn’t have a problem finding PR ethics issues to highlight this week. While the limo ride is an obvious example, and one I plan to discuss in class tonight, I wanted to focus on a few other interesting stories including various forms of censorship:
Mark Cautela, the Head of Communications for Harvard Business School, discusses a number of important ethics topics including:
1) Why you need to act quickly and decisively on even small ethics concerns
2) When company and team before self is not ethically appropriate
3) What to do when your boss asks you to fudge numbers on an award
The PRSA and PRCA ethics months are over. Does that mean we are going to stop discussing ethics? Heck no! That is not how we roll at EthicalVoices. Please note: this week we will not be discussing the ethics of tax returns or sharing confidential documents – others are doing that quite well. Rather I decided to build a cornucopia of the most interesting ethics stories of the past week including effective ethics training.
Sam Villegas, APR, a Senior Consultant with Raftelis shares insight on:
1) What do you do when you are asked to stonewall on a public health issue?
2) When should you act as a whistle blower?
3) How do you effectively respond to disinformation and fear-based attacks?