Ethics Newsline®

NEW YORK
Billionaire Warren Buffett last week used plain talk to warn his senior staff about the temptations of ethical shortcuts.

The second-richest man in the United States said that “the five most dangerous words in business may be, ‘Everybody else is doing it,” according to Forbes.

The Financial Times reported that Buffett ordered top managers at his Berkshire Hathaway Group to crack down on unethical behavior, citing the recent spate of allegedly backdated stock options in various high-tech industries as an example of “bad behavior.”

The Times said it secured a memo in which Buffett warned that some misbehavior is inevitable in his 200,000-employee company, “but we can have a huge effect in minimizing such activities by jumping on anything immediately when there is the slightest odor of impropriety.”

“Berkshire’s reputation is in your hands,” Buffett added.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Buffett warned that good corporate behavior goes beyond simply adhering to the letter of the law. He also told executives they must be comfortable with their actions if they were printed “on the front page of a newspaper.”