When Nada and I read this Economist story about Harvard Business School graduates pledging to act with integrity, our first reaction was one of cynicism. It’s all very well to get students to pledge to “serve the greater good” and “act with the utmost integrity,” but making these anything other than platitudes is difficult.
The question is: has Harvard Business School identified what that greater good is, or is the pledge just window dressing? [...]

Those ‘ traditional Washington Politics ‘ that Andrew mentioned in yesterday’s post refer to the way that in the US and UK, well organized and well funded corporate bodies can exert a great deal of influence on the government.
Companies can directly donate to a candidate and expect some sort of quid pro quo , or the influence can be less direct: Karthik Ramanna from Harvard Business School and Sugata Roychowdhury of MIT recently wrote a white paper that suggests that in the 2004 election, outsourcing firms located in political battlegrounds were underreporting their profits to deflect attention from their (likely profitable) outsourcing, so that candidates wouldn’t have to confront the issue.
 To get away from these sorts of direct and indirect influence, political and administrative boundaries need to be redesigned. Greater transparency of the interrelationship between politicians, advisors, civil servants, [...]