Krehmeyer Speaks at Smith's Business Ethics Lecture Series

On Monday, April 21, 2008 the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland welcomed Dean Krehmeyer to its Business Ethics Speaker Series. Krehmeyer is the executive director of the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics, an independent entity established in partnership with Business Roundtable, an association of 160 CEOs from leading companies. Krehmeyer presented his lecture, “Embedding Ethics into Business Decision Making and Actions,” to a group of about seventy-five Smith School students.
Krehmeyer opened the lecture by introducing Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics, which is a partnership between Business Roundtable and leading faculty from top business schools. It provides guidance, seminars and publications to help guide business leaders on ethical decisions and corporate ethics frameworks. Krehmeyer then spent some time talking about his own background. Before joining the institute, Krehmeyer was a manager with consulting firm A.T. Kearney and worked for Deloitte & Touche.

Krehmeyer spoke about how accounting scandals often lead to regulatory driven changes. He highlighted Sarbanes-Oxley and Accounting Standard No. 99 as two recent examples of this type of change, noting that the 2004 amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations specifically reference ethical culture as a responsibility of organization executives. Krehmeyer said that this was the first time ethics has been explicitly referenced by the regulators.

Krehmeyer then launched the group into a series of interactive case exercises on ethical dilemmas. First he surveyed the group on the reasons they feel accounting scandals occur and the future responsibility of current business students in terms of ethical practices. Krehmeyer noted that the definition of ethics can vary widely depending on the person, organization, or country that defines it. He then urged students to consider the implications of making ethical decisions and the different ways they can be perceived publicly.

Krehmeyer led the group into a discussion of the top corporate ethics issues and how corporate ethics can influence business results. In order to fully explain some of the issues, Krehmeyer used a series of case exercises where the students could interactively participate and make ethical decisions based on the issues at hand. He suggested that the students try to build a framework by which to evaluate the facts and issues surrounding the problems. He concluded the lecture by stressing that companies and individuals can stress compliance with ethical codes and standards or they can integrate ethics into their enterprise. Krehmeyer suggested in closing that enterprise ethics make for a stronger corporate focus on ethical decision making and have positive impact on business results.

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▓ Adam Weiner, MBA Candidate 2009, Smith Media Group