Jeffrey Pfeffer

Nothing keeps a person accountable like a signature. That John Hancock still carries the same weight it did back in 1776.

When the collapse of a Bangladesh garment factory killed over 1,100 workers last month—and eight more perished in a fire at another clothing factory soon after—astonishingly, the clothing retailers tied to these tragedies claimed to know nothing at all about where their merchandise is made or under what conditions. Of course, such ignorance (along with cost savings) is one of the virtues of contracting out: You can always deny knowing anything about what your contractors or subcontractors are doing.

As the soap opera about whether Jamie Dimon will or will not continue to hold the chairman’s role at JPMorgan Chase continues, and while there is ongoing discussion of whether banks are too big to fail, what’s missing from the conversation is much sense of the real problem at big banks—a problem that partly drives the bizarre risk-taking in the first place. That problem is losing too many high-value customers. I was reminded of this when a friend who currently does business and personal banking with Comerica asked for a recommendation because he intends to move his accounts.

Beset by critics and bedeviled by a declining stock price, Tim Cook, the company’s beleaguered chief executive, announced a big stock buyback and a substantial dividend increase. The market did not, however, respond by pushing up Apple’s stock price. But these actions do raise the question why Apple, which has too much cash on its books and is trying desperately to return cash to its shareholders, a company unlikely ever again to need to raise money in the public markets, should worry so much about its share price anyway?

As Congressional budget battles heat up—or roll along, depending on your time perspective—the cost of health care in America receives a lot of attention. Unfortunately most of the discussion is largely off the mark about where the preventable, unnecessary costs really are. Yes, there is certainly over treatment, particularly of people in their last days of life. Yes, doctors under a fee-for-service arrangement do have financial incentives to do too much, and the fear of malpractice can lead to overtesting and overtreatment. As the recent article in Time by Steven Brill illustrated, pricing of medical care is neither invariably transparent nor sensible. And it would certainly be nice if care were better coordinated across functional specialties.

With the resignation of two directors and Ray Lane’s relinquishing his role of board chairman, the turmoil at the top of Hewlett-Packard, a tale of almost soap opera proportions, continues. But HP’s story is scarcely unique. Many companies make unsuccessful acquisitions, boards continue to search for corporate saviors from the outside, and few directors suffer any consequences for overseeing catastrophic problems. All this provides evidence that corporate governance remains a problem in many publicly traded companies.

As the U.S. Postal Service, running enormous deficits, closes processing centers, sells off real estate, and inexorably counts down to the day in August when it will cease Saturday mail delivery unless Congress intervenes, its senior leaders blame the Internet, Congress, almost everything but the Postal Service itself. Ah, the well-documented tendency to blame problems on the environment and attribute success to leaders’ brilliance. But the problem with the USPS, like problems with most businesses, is inside, not outside, the organization. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the USPS’s customer satisfaction is 75, well below the score for the consumer shipping industry, 82.

Many people criticize the Affordable Care Act (sometimes called Obamacare) with misleading and factually incorrect implications. But distortions, repeated often enough, too often come to be taken as truth. It is important, therefore, to be clear on the many virtues of ACA and its effects on employees.

Endlessly repeating falsehoods won’t make them true—something that stock analysts and the press need to learn about mergers in general and airline mergers specifically. So no, the much anticipated American-US Airways merger is unlikely to be a success by any measure. That’s because, in the airline industry, as in many industries, size really does not matter for success, except possibly negatively.

Pick your preferred performance measure, and see if it shows any relationship with size.  The well-known ranking of U.S. airline performance by Brent Bowen of Purdue and Dean Headly of Wichita State listed these airlines as best in 2012: AirTran (AAI), Hawaiian (HA),Jet Blue (JBLU), Frontier (FRNT), Alaska (ALK), Delta (DAL), Southwest (LUV), U. S. Airways (LCC), Skywest (SKYW), and American (AMR). United (UAL), following its well-chronicled integration problems with Continental, ranked 12^th. In general, the bigger the airline, the lower the ranking.

Every CEO will at some point face a crisis that forces a choice between doing what may be good for the short-term bottom line–or doing instead what builds a great reputation that attracts clients and employees in the long term, and an ethical culture that can immunize it from further trouble.

Standard and Poor’s offers an object lesson in what not to do.

The Case Against S&P

Does it shock anyone these days that so many companies’ mission statements and codes of ethics seem to bear so little resemblance to what companies actually do? The words are crafted to quicken our heartbeats and bring tears to our eyes.

• Bank of America, whose aspiration is to become “the world’s most admired company,” says it’s committed to helping customers and clients at every stage of their financial lives–well, maybe not every, as this is a company paying huge financial settlements because of its abuse of the mortgage origination and foreclosure processes.