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It is now for more than a month that we read about the horse meat scandal in Europe – or the ‘2013 meat adulteration scandal’, as it is referred to on its own Wikipedia  page. Today we learned that the scope of the issue is by no means just linked to some obscure Romanian supplier. High street brands such as Nestlé and Birds Eye are now implicated and there is little hope that this will die down any time soon. Scandals around food, and in particular meat production, are anything but new. The seminal event here is still the BSE scandal nearly two decades ago. But there are some remarkable differences with this latest one. Initially, it is worth noting that the BSE scandal was around meat that was potentially harmful; BSE infected meat can cause Creutzfeld-Jakob disease which until 2009 has killed 166 in the UK (the then centre of the epidemic). Horsemeat as such is not harmful to health (though some contaminants have been discovered from medication horses were given to enhance perfo...

Everyone knows that getting employees engaged in sustainability initiatives is tough. This fun little video shows why so many efforts go wrong and how "green jujitsu" offers green champions a better way forward. It's not saying anything new to anyone that has been in the field a while, but it gets the message across really well in less than two minutes ... and its great advice for getting started in employment engagement. As Gareth Kane from Terra Infirma , who put the video together says, "It's deliberately lightweight, but it carries an important message - ditch the eco-cliches and put yourself in your colleagues' shoes."    Here's the original link on Youtube which tells you a little more about the green jujitsu approach - essentially using your employees strengths, habits and interests as an opportunity rather than a threat.  

Over the past two days, we've had the good fortune to hear up close what Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, has to say about responsible capitalism and the role of Unilever in making the world a better place. Polman has been in Toronto speaking in the Bata Lecture Series on Responsible Capitalism hosted by the Schulich School of Business. And from what we've heard, Polman is in a different league to most of the other identi-kit CEOs out there. He really gets that business has to do things differently if its to succeed and prosper in the future. And so far, he's been backing that vision up with real progress. That's not to say that Unilever is anywhere close yet to being a truly sustainable company, but few CEOs of global multinationals can match Polman's grasp of the challenges ahead. And more importantly, few can match his visioning of where he wants to get to. Polman says that what we need to do is change the conversation about social responsibility from one about a ...

Ethics in sports has become a big talking point. In North America, we are just at the end of a humongous news cycle on Lance Armstrong’s ‘ confessions ’ on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Armstrong’s story very much turned – as many ethical issues tend to – into a story of character, personal integrity and individual morality. Even though most people know by now that doping in cycling is endemic and that he is probably much more the product of entrenched practices in the business of professional cycling. We have commented on ethics in sports here and there in the past and this week’s installment of scandals in professional sports seems another good occasion to add some observations from a business ethics angle. We are talking about the news  from Europol (the pan-European crime investigation unit) revealing large-scale match fixing activity in global professional football (or soccer, for our North American readers). They claim to having identified 380 manipulated games (at all levels) and ...