Analytics

Corporate Governance

What is Corporate Governance?

In this context after the
Volkswagen fiasco one has to
look at when Hermes EOS, the
stewardship division of Hermes
Investment Management, calling
for an overhaul of the
management and corporate
governance culture at
Volkswagen.
Extract – Can VW fiasco be avoided? Nope, Not with a spreadsheet Org. structure

Business enterprise is a profound thought of good intentions toward the society, which sets apart corporate culture over individual choice. A culture is a function of true knowledge of awareness, an identity with the ethical responsibility, that by which corporate infers and society teaches.
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Knowledge is the Goal of Ethics

A rule expresses the truth and justifies the conduct.
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A rule expresses the truth and when it is being certified to have been followed as prescribed, then it justifies conduct. That truth is ethics and that conduct is knowledge. Therefore, knowledge is the goal of ethics… The knowledge base is empty now. Any corporate not founded in an ethical motive is wrong.
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Freedom of enterprise is a freedom to choose right, not wrong. It is not a choice between right and wrong.
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Dr Radhakrishnan (Indian philosopher and former president of India) mentions Pascal’s well-known classification of the ways to belief, custom, reason, and inspiration suggests three stages of mental evolution—
sense, reason, and intuition—though they are not to be regarded as chronologically successive and separate. In youth, we rise from the empirical to the dialectical stage when we argue and derive conclusions from observed data. At a more mature stage, we obtain a synthetic and intuitive knowledge of reality by means of an experience that embraces the whole soul. But intuition, though it includes the testimony of will and feeling, is never fully attained without strenuous intellectual effort. It cannot dispense with the discipline of reason and the technique of proof. He goes on to warn that the intuitive consciousness is not to be confused with the instinctive.
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Instinctive is a term we associate with reaction and intuitive with knowledge, from gross to subtle. The dictionary meaning of it, however, describes instinctive as one without conscious thought and intuitive as one without conscious reasoning, and as the expression goes many a slip between the cup and the lip.
When we analyze the three stages of mental evolution, senses are related to instinctive reaction, reason to logical knowledge, which Dr Radhakrishnan says is comparable to a finger that points to the object and disappears when the object is seen, whereas intuitive knowledge is to a higher wavelength of the discipline of reason with the technique of proof. All three have a common thread: Instinctive reaction relates to a physical effort, reasoning to an intellectual effort (to trigger the finger to go in search of an object or a solution), and intuitive knowledge to an intellectual effort of egoistic discrimination.
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