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Peter Chapman

Very Good but not what I expected.

Revisado en el Reino Unido 🇬🇧 el 1 de enero de 2023

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I expected to learn about the mental make up of executives who commit fraud, but often bad behaviour was excused as a one off event in an otherwise virtuous life. From my own experience a minority of individuals in all walks of life have a sense of entitlement and are always on the lookout for an opportunity to cheat.

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Ian Mann

These are some of the fineist minds in the world who came to Harvard to become great business leaders

Revisado en los Estados Unidos 🇺🇸 el 11 de mayo de 2018

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In 1939, Edwin Sutherland, a distinguished and influential sociologist and author then most popular university textbook on criminology, changed understanding of crime. He asserted that belief that crime was restricted to murder, assault, and burglary, largely committed by individuals in the lower social classes, was misleading and incorrect.
Based on public criminal records, most serious crime was being committed instead, by society’s most well-known and respected business leaders. Sutherland coined the term: “white-collar crime.”
An example he presented was of a grocery store executive who embezzled $600,000 (worth over $10m today,) in just one year. This was 6 times the entire amount from five hundred robberies that occurred at the same chain of stores during the year.
Professor Eugene Soltes is a Harvard business professor who has based the conclusions of this book on written communication and visits with 48 former executives who were now in prison. These people had overseen some of the most significant corporate failures in history. These communications more conversational and casual and the subjects provided very different explanations than they had in court.
Historically, criminologist and society at large have, believed that criminality stemmed from psychological aberration. Some thought it might be due excessive greed or ambition or a faulty analysis of the risk to reward involved.
This book was written with Prof. Soltes’ students in mind. These are some of the fineist minds in the world who came to Harvard to become great business leaders, certainly not publicly humiliated, business and family destroying criminals. More than 2 dozen have though.
To get the most out this book and even this article, to what would you attribute succumbing to white collar crime? Then consider that for all the suggestions above, there is little concrete evidence or support.
Surprisingly little was understood about the choices that led to these people’s downfall.
What the author found was these white-collar criminals spend surprisingly little effort thinking about the consequences of their actions. “They seem to have reached their decisions to commit crimes with little thought or reflection,” his investigations confirm.
This was largely because they never really felt that the decisions were actually harmful to themselves or other real people. Stealing money from someone’s pocket involves a high degree of intimacy, these executives never need to get close—physically or psychologically—to their victims.
“While the aggregate costs are difficult to assess precisely, one estimate placed the annual cost of financial fraud in the United States at nearly $400 billion,” says Soltes. With such significant consequences, it is not surprising that business schools, and businesses teach “business ethics” as one means of trying to address this problem.
But if the cause is misdiagnosed the remedy will not work. Soltes sees the cause as very different to much that I have studied at university or read about. “There is an implicit—and flawed—assumption that participants would employ the same decision-making process they used in the classroom if they faced the same predicament at some point in their own future.”
Only twenty-three seconds after hearing a report of the problem at Goldman Sachs a former MD of McKinsey Rajat Gupta called an associate Rajaratnam and divulged this news. Rajaratnam sold his position in Goldman the following day before the news was public and avoided losing $3 million. Gupta neither no money from this at all, but served a prison sentence for this crime. One would have expected person widely lauded for his thoughtful leadership and deep strategic mind not to have made such a foolish and criminal decision.
In seconds before the call, he do some clever calculation that showed that the benefits of providing this information to Rajaratnam outweighed the expected costs. He actedon his imperfect intuition.
Would you commit a crime so instinctively that has potential harm to others and yourself?
In our day-to-day lives we tend to rely on initial and often unsatisfactory intuitive judgments, called “blinds spots,” by psychologists Bazerman and Tenbrunsel. When the big moral challenge comes, we will rise to the occasion, right.
It’s a public holiday (as is the time of writing this!) and you are driving on the highway between Johannesburg and Pretoria. You are listening to energy pumping music as you weave between the cars. Then you notice you are driving at 132 kph in a 120 zone. But you are in a great mood, your car in as great condition and so is the highway. And a lot of other motorists are also driving above the speed limit. So, you continue.
You could be involved in an accident at that speed in which your passenger, your life partner is maimed and the occupants of the other vehicles and killed or severely injured.
Did you have criminal intent? The court will and so will the families of the victims.
What would stop you? Seeing the traffic police. Seeing a fresh accident. You partner imploring you to slow down -NOW!
What made for that bad decision and what stopped it? When everyone around you is doing it is just, well, seems okay. When there is no one to tell you forcefully that what you are doing is wrong and dangerous, doing it is just, well, seems okay.
Just ask Dennis Kozlowski, the former CEO of Tyco who one of the highest-paid CEOs in the world who was convicted for embezzling nearly $100m.
Mark Whitacre was a senior executive of ADM. It was his wife, Ginger who horror when h mentioned he was on the negotiating team involved in negotiating international price-fixing that shocked him into the realization of his criminal involvement. “It was a way for me to separate from a culture that I had fallen into... She felt like she was losing me.”
Do you have a Ginger?

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Beach Town Reader

Insightful

Revisado en los Estados Unidos 🇺🇸 el 6 de mayo de 2023

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Not a quickie listical book. This author goes in depth on how people can find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Reads like a thriller novel but is oh so real. If you are an individual investor or an employee of any type and you're wondering where you fall on the ethics spectrum, this book will be insightful.

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Robert B. Lamm

I Respectfully (and Strongly) Disagree

Revisado en los Estados Unidos 🇺🇸 el 2 de enero de 2017

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First, a confession: I did not finish this book. I do not recall ever reviewing a book that I have not finished, even when I got much closer to the end than was the case here.

However, I am writing this review because I strongly disagree with Professor Soltes's thesis about why executives commit crimes. The first part of his thesis appears to be that white collar crime is a new phenomenon and that the acts for which people are now being convicted and sentenced to prison were long considered part of normal business operations. I say "appears to be" because he never quite enunciates the second thought; however, it is implicit in his long exposition of the development of white collar crime.

The second part of his thesis -- and for brevity I'm taking it directly from the flyleaf -- is that executives' "gut feelings are often poorly suited for the modern business world where leaders are increasingly distanced from the consequences of their decisions and the individuals they impact". In other words, they didn't know the gun was loaded and thus couldn't help themselves.

I readily admit that I am summarizing in a very few words what Professor Soltes takes 300+ pages to state. However, I think I've fairly summed up the core of this thinking, and I cannot say clearly enough how wrong I find it to be.

Professor Soltes starts out the book with a description of his methodology, which included writing to executives who were convicted of or pled guilty to crimes and served time. One of those men was Stephen Richards of Computer Associates. I was employed by CA for three years -- beginning after the SEC and DOJ had started the investigations that led to Mr. Richards's conviction -- and while I barely knew Mr. Richards and don't really know or recall what he did or didn't do, I believe that at least some of the people at CA, if not Mr. Richards, were very well aware of what they were doing and the impact on investors and went ahead and did it anyway. And I am familiar with other instances of white collar crimes committed by executives and attorneys who knew that what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway; lawyers who obtained confidential information about as yet unannounced merger transactions and bought the stock of the targets and executives who backdated stock options to take advantage of stock price fluctuations, to cite just two examples. The common theme of these actions is that people don't usually go to jail over technical violations of obscure regulatory provisions; rather, they go to jail for actions that their grandmothers would know were just plain wrong.

I don't have an answer for why they do it, because I think there are many answers, and every convicted white collar criminal probably has a different combination of reasons -- hubris, the sense of their own infallibility and a low regard for bureaucrats, among others. I've even asked prosecutors why they think white collar criminals do what they do and have been told that it depends on the crime and the individual. But to blame it on some vague distance from reality doesn't pass my smell test.

Professor Soltes also ignores a number of critical facts in the case of CA, which leads me to believe that he conveniently ignores critical facts in other cases. Specifically, he talks about the fact that managing earnings, as happened in the case of CA, is done every day by many companies and that what constitutes "permissible" versus impermissible earnings management is unclear and complex. So far so good, I suppose. But he doesn't mention that CA also engaged in a massive cover-up that most informed people would construe as obstruction of justice. Again, I don't know or don't recall whether Mr. Richards was a part of that cover-up, but to ignore it entirely is mystifying, to put it mildly, except that focusing on the obstruction of justice charges might jeopardize his thesis.

One final word about another aspect of Professor Soltes's methodology that I find a bit disingenuous. He says early on that he didn't speak with cooperating witnesses because their "deliberate distortion of narratives...to win over prosecutors...contorts our understanding of what the executives thought and felt while their crimes unfolded". Perhaps that's the case, but does he think that the executives with whom he spoke did not engage in "deliberate distortion" to redeem their reputations or for other purposes? How does he know that? Did he attempt to compare and contrast their stories with those of other players or even the court records? And how could Professor Soltes possibly have a full picture of the facts surrounding the CA matter without even referring to the still-imprisoned (I think) deposed CEO, Sanjay Kumar?

I applaud Professor Soltes's efforts to determine why white collar criminals do what they do. However, it seems to me that in an effort to validate his theory he ignores or dismisses any theories or facts that conflict with his own.

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Al Pal

Solid on exploring the motivation, rich in examples, weak on identifying the enablers

Revisado en los Estados Unidos 🇺🇸 el 21 de agosto de 2017

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Why do they do it? Soltes builds good evidence with a tremendous number of case studies to answer this tricky question from the motivational perspective, but I think he goes a little easy on the perpetrators and the current system of enablers. I understand why the author avoids the self-righteous tone. After all, the criminals became his pen pals as he worked on this book, and he met quite a few of them in-person. Some relationship-building ended up taking place. Keeping that in mind, the book does not devolve into a full-on apologia of their behavior, but harsh in judgement it is not. Nor is the book deep in acknowledging a whole host of enablers that incent, act slowly, don’t think critically, behave dismissively, and/or at times ignore the crime – that may be a harder subject to broach since those people are perfectly happy with themselves and are not in jail.

Soltes covers the historic background on the rise of white-collar crime as a concept within our justice system. Then he discusses psychological and organizational reasons that may incent corporate executives to cross beyond the grey space of corporate gamesmanship. In short, I think the framework of – Pressure, Opportunity, Rationalization – works quite well to explain a lot of misbehavior in Corporate America. Yet I would argue there is still plenty of work to be done to study the specific traits or pressures that end up leading people in the wrong direction, and talk about the enablers (internal and external to the company).

I think volume two of this work, if the author ever considers pursuing this subject matter further, should involve discussion about the market participants who deal with these types of executives before their crime becomes official – wall street research analysts, i-bankers, auditors, institutional investors, SEC investigators, short sellers, etc. It may be amazing to see just how much the current system enables corporate crossover onto the dark side. Victims, beneficiaries, and investigators must all have a treatment on this topic.

A 5 personas les ha parecido esto útil

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Deeply insightful, sometimes disturbing peek into white collar crime

Revisado en los Estados Unidos 🇺🇸 el 1 de abril de 2021

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This book is a super insightful look into the minds and techniques of people convicted of major white collar fraud. Through interviews conducted over several years, the author tries to put together a tapestry of reasons and circumstances that make some people commit major fraud. Among the most disturbing revelations is that it always starts small, so small that it doesn't look like fraud. A small misplaced booking entry to meet the quarter's goals as an example. And it grows from there.

It reminded of what Clay Christensen, another HBS professor, said "“it's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.”

The book is also stark reminder that there is a lot more fraud than gets caught and convicted.
The interviewees seem to have made deep and startling confessions to the author, no doubt the result of his excellent interviewing skills. It gives us a good glimpse on how they actual think ( then and after being convicted)

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Kyle Welch

This is a fun book

Revisado en los Estados Unidos 🇺🇸 el 5 de octubre de 2016

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Don't waste any more time reading reviews. If you are looking at this book on Amazon, you are likely the type of person that would love it. The book is incredibly well written and moreover, well researched. After reading it, you will be surprised with the knowledge you walk away with from such an entertaining read.

I have found prior efforts in this literature to offer knee-jerk platitudes as the causal mechanisms in these crimes, providing the most obvious and uninsightful observations. Most books and articles read like a child story book plot when relating these stories.

Eugene Soltes has done something unique with this book. Its unique approach becomes evident when you review the references and footnotes. This is not only the most comprehensive study on white-collar crime; but a thoughtful weaving of how it relates to multiple academic disciplines. This book is obviously a labor of love for Eugene Soltes--that is the only way to explain how well this book and ideas have been put together.

Looking forward to seeing what he does next.

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Great book!

Revisado en Brasil 🇧🇷 el 10 de octubre de 2020

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Loved it! The author proposes an analysis on the motivation of notorious white-collar criminals. Well written and easy to read.

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Larry

Important, interesting, and easy to read.

Revisado en los Estados Unidos 🇺🇸 el 1 de octubre de 2016

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Prof. Soltes has written an important book which will help people think about and understand the nature and causes of white-collar crime.
Journalists often argue that all business schools should teach ethics. It seems obvious that analysts, directors, and managers need to understand how human nature, competitive pressures, and a lack of clear guidelines can lead to potentially disastrous choices. But how do you teach adults to be honest? How do you teach someone to not cross an undefined line?
Prof. Soltes provides an answer by describing the evolution of white collar crime and a narrative in the words of those who have been convicted of it. “Why They Do It” provides a framework and examples which the next generation of business leaders can learn from.
The book is an easy to read history with vivid relatable examples. It should be required reading for all managers.

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Savenoak_Road

This book is far and away the best treatment of this fascinating subject

Revisado en los Estados Unidos 🇺🇸 el 7 de octubre de 2016

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This book is far and away the best treatment of this fascinating subject. Soltes has interviewed an incredible number of America's most famous white collar criminals, and put together a compelling picture of how these often successful businessmen end up losing everything by committing fraud. His main thesis is that people commit white collar crimes because their moral intuitions lead them astray. In other words, while these actions really harm lots of people (e.g. falsifying accounting statements), in the heat of the moment, they don't *feel* like they're hurting anyone, because the victims are remote and the harm is abstract. It's a really interesting idea, and the book is full of lots of amazing stories from the people he's interviewed, including Bernie Madoff and various Enron executives.

Highly recommended.

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Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal

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