Captain Spaulding: How We Communicate About Business Ethics

?Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.?
Author ? Unknown
There are many good reasons to be able to communicate effectively about ethics. One is, industry and especially mortgage banking has lost a lot of the publics? trust and by all estimations needs to regain some of that back. If you are doing something about that but are not able to express it, the benefits of your efforts may be a long time in coming.
Closer to home, as society continues to react to the financial crisis, our front line employees are repeatedly asked to deliver government sponsored programs or comply with under-defined regulations which constantly yield unintended consequences.
Another reason is that business schools are beginning to say that they have historically relied too heavily on quantitative aspects of business and are identifying qualitative aspects missing from their curriculums. So our bright young graduates and tomorrow?s leaders have no experience discussing ethics.
Can we competently discuss ethics within our environment? A recent study of mortgage banking leaders suggests that senior leaders discuss ethics amongst themselves pretty freely, they discuss them with their employee base a fair amount and with their board of directors the least. It also found that leaders discuss ethics more frequently than attempt to write about it. Over 90% of those who participated in the survey said their organizations had a Code of Ethics, so the first step in a foundation with words and thoughts does exist in those environments.
While leaders were confident in their own ethical clarity and observable ethical actions, they were far less confident in their employees? ethical understanding. In the absence of senior leaders talking and writing about the industry?s or firm?s ethics, are employees only left with the narrative formed by the media or politicians? Will that improve the industry?s ability to add its voice to the public debate about who and how home finance is structured in the future?
Less than half the survey respondents indicated that their firms had a methodology to deal with ethical issues. However, an ethical framework needs to be in place to enhance communication and improve the influence in society the industry has in determining its future. (... maybe - to improve industry?s prospects of determining its own future through its influence in the society?)
An ethical framework uses the vision/mission of a planning process (purpose), and a code of ethics to align the firm?s values. These values are put it (incorporated?) into the firm?s documentation (policy & procedures, job descriptions, performance reviews and any other documentation which supports manager and employee decision making. It requires the firm to train its employees and managers on ethics adequately and regularly. Additionally, to ensure usage, your ethics key performance indicators must be identified which are usually answers to stakeholder issues and questions. Then create reports and score cards to track the indicators and measure improvement on a topic. Finally introduce into standing committee agendas these reports and score card to reinforce that managers and employees are accountable to perform these tasks regularly and to be fully operationalized.
The development of this framework along with embracing it will create a common language about ethics within your organization as well as help align your firm?s values with its people?s decision making. This foundation will support enhancing your firm?s voice in the debate on the future of the industry.

Source: http://hugoquackenbush.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-we-communicate-about-business-ethics.html

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NASA's Swift satellite discovers a new black hole in Milky Way galaxy

ScienceDaily (Oct. 5, 2012) ? NASA's Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole.

"Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they're essentially once-a-mission events and this is the first one Swift has seen," said Neil Gehrels, the mission's principal investigator, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "This is really something we've been waiting for."

An X-ray nova is a short-lived X-ray source that appears suddenly, reaches its emission peak in a few days and then fades out over a period of months. The outburst arises when a torrent of stored gas suddenly rushes toward one of the most compact objects known, either a neutron star or a black hole.

The rapidly brightening source triggered Swift's Burst Alert Telescope twice on the morning of Sept. 16, and once again the next day.

Named Swift J1745-26 after the coordinates of its sky position, the nova is located a few degrees from the center of our galaxy toward the constellation Sagittarius. While astronomers do not know its precise distance, they think the object resides about 20,000 to 30,000 light-years away in the galaxy's inner region.

Ground-based observatories detected infrared and radio emissions, but thick clouds of obscuring dust have prevented astronomers from catching Swift J1745-26 in visible light.

The nova peaked in hard X-rays -- energies above 10,000 electron volts, or several thousand times that of visible light -- on Sept. 18, when it reached an intensity equivalent to that of the famous Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant that serves as a calibration target for high-energy observatories and is considered one of the brightest sources beyond the solar system at these energies.

Even as it dimmed at higher energies, the nova brightened in the lower-energy, or softer, emissions detected by Swift's X-ray Telescope, a behavior typical of X-ray novae. By Wednesday, Swift J1745-26 was 30 times brighter in soft X-rays than when it was discovered and it continued to brighten.

"The pattern we're seeing is observed in X-ray novae where the central object is a black hole. Once the X-rays fade away, we hope to measure its mass and confirm its black hole status," said Boris Sbarufatti, an astrophysicist at Brera Observatory in Milan, Italy, who currently is working with other Swift team members at Penn State in University Park, Pa.

The black hole must be a member of a low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) system, which includes a normal, sun-like star. A stream of gas flows from the normal star and enters into a storage disk around the black hole. In most LMXBs, the gas in the disk spirals inward, heats up as it heads toward the black hole, and produces a steady stream of X-rays.

But under certain conditions, stable flow within the disk depends on the rate of matter flowing into it from the companion star. At certain rates, the disk fails to maintain a steady internal flow and instead flips between two dramatically different conditions -- a cooler, less ionized state where gas simply collects in the outer portion of the disk like water behind a dam, and a hotter, more ionized state that sends a tidal wave of gas surging toward the center.

"Each outburst clears out the inner disk, and with little or no matter falling toward the black hole, the system ceases to be a bright source of X-rays," said John Cannizzo, a Goddard astrophysicist. "Decades later, after enough gas has accumulated in the outer disk, it switches again to its hot state and sends a deluge of gas toward the black hole, resulting in a new X-ray outburst."

This phenomenon, called the thermal-viscous limit cycle, helps astronomers explain transient outbursts across a wide range of systems, from protoplanetary disks around young stars, to dwarf novae -- where the central object is a white dwarf star -- and even bright emission from supermassive black holes in the hearts of distant galaxies.

Swift, launched in November 2004, is managed by Goddard Space Flight Center. It is operated in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., with international collaborators in the United Kingdom and Italy and including contributions from Germany and Japan.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/K2gZNk6K3e0/121005162822.htm

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