We can choose not to engage in improving the world. We can seize on every advantage available to us and our companies without thought to the consequences. We can act as if the planet and the global economy are not among our most critical stakeholders. We can join the crush of others who are just hoping to play out the string: keep our heads down, meet our numbers, collect our bonuses, and abdicate long-term responsibility to the next generation. But when we make those choices, we do violence against the future.

Unethical behavior and misconduct has been a persistent problem in the business world. A company’s ethical norms are a cumulative outcome of how daily ethical dilemmas are addressed in the workplace. Over time, these micro-level issues can evolve into a corporate ethics scandal — unless organizations work to help employees make ethical choices day to day.

Software continues to “eat the world,” but often at the cost of user privacy and trust. In order to grow responsibly, companies must move from a “can we” to a “should we” framework when bringing products to market.

The fusion of business, technology, and ethics is unfolding at a rate that appears to outstrip our ability as citizens to have meaningful and careful conversations about the effects of our actions on others. At the same time, the civic processes that should encourage innovative solutions to new problems appear to be broken. What we need is a commitment to honestly talk about the challenges technology now poses.

In the wake of the #MeToo and #TimesUp social movements — not to mention the continuing wave of resignations amid misconduct allegations — sexual harassment policies must be on your board’s agenda. This is true regardless of whether the organization is public, private, or nonprofit. For the sake of all its stakeholders, employees, and customers, directors need to do the right thing — and do it now.

Researchers have identified six distinct mindsets that contribute to leaders’ portfolio of leadership styles by asking one simple question: Whom do the leaders serve? Identifying these mindsets can help companies recognize how the leader’s styles are helping — or hurting — their performance.

Many ethical, lawfully managed businesses have consumer data they aren’t legally authorized to possess, obtained from a surprising source: their customers, who inadvertently share the personal data of family, friends, and colleagues. And in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the enactment of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, peer-dependent privacy is emerging as a critical consideration for businesses.

Much has been made of the way online platforms have been used to manipulate Western political systems — but this is just one of many greater issues facing the modern world. It’s time for business leaders to insist on policies prioritizing humanitarian and environmental values.

In the wake of documented Russian manipulation of the U.S. election via disinformation campaigns on social media platforms, digital platform companies like Facebook and Twitter need to take concrete steps to prevent misuse.

When an ethics scandal damaged the reputation of Swedish telecom giant Telia and led to the ouster of its top managers, the company’s incoming leadership took a radical new turn: Changing from a corporate strategy with sustainability programs to a sustainable strategy.

Business leaders are often selfish. They honestly think they are entitled to more resources than anyone else, and that they have earned the right to take more. Their self-serving behavior is usually enabled by their organizations. But three strategies can help: Organizations can choose leaders who tilt away from self-serving frameworks; create systems that reinforce fairer evaluations; and recognize the added complexities that arise on the global stage.

In his new book, WTF?, Tim O’Reilly takes issues with the vogue for disruption. “The point of a disruptive technology is not the market or competitors that it destroys. It is the new markets and the new possibilities that it creates,” he writes.

Creating innovative products and services that disrupt the status quo requires creativity, and creativity involves thinking differently about constraints. But too much of a “the rules don’t apply to us” attitude can lead to ethical crises. That’s what’s happened at Uber, where a string of controversies led to a mass exodus of executives, including the company’s president and CEO. Organizations intent on innovating need to understand ahead of time the consequences of breaking certain rules.

Companies with rigorous compliance programs hope such programs will curtail employee wrongdoing. But to prevent employee misconduct, companies also need to understand how employees reach unethical decisions — and what affects their decision-making processes.

As analytics and big data continue to be integrated into organizational ways and means from the C-suite to the front lines, authors Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern believe that a new kind of company will emerge. They call it the “mathematical corporation” — a mashup of technology and human ingenuity in which machines delve into every aspect of a business in previously impossible ways.

Algorithms are affecting many aspects of daily life, but most people have no clarity as to how they work — even in the companies that create and use them. But individuals and organizations need to carefully consider what this lack of transparency means when it comes to fairness and honesty in commercial interactions and decide where to draw the line on data ethics.

Organizations have made rapid gains in their ability to generate big data sets, but the ability of managers and executives to develop insights from that data has lagged behind. Data processing by artificial intelligence offers the prospect of speeding things up — but it also risks expanding the gap, as managers lack understanding of how AI reaches its data-based conclusions.

Eight out of 10 executives surveyed say that as the business value of data grows, the risks their companies face from improper handling of data increase exponentially. While digital advancements enable new opportunities for businesses to compete and thrive, they also create increased exposure to systemic risks. Success in the digital age will require a new kind of ethical review around how companies gather and use data.

How sure are you sure that you are directing your own behavior? Or are your actions a product of a context that has been carefully shaped by data, analysis, and code?

An inquiry into the design ethics of apps; making the business case for predictive analytics; 3D printing enters the business mainstream.