ABSTRACT
A new discipline designed many of the products, services, and actions that caused the 2008 financial crisis—financial engineering. Major business schools teach financial engineering and award advanced degrees in this new discipline. In 2009 the business press and the daily news filled their pages and their TV hours with news of costly and painful outcomes. Highly profitable financial products, services, and actions a few years before resulted in the 2008 financial crisis and a costly, painful recession. Companies concentrate on what they do now, planning, producing, and further improving their products and services; satisfying their customers and continuously creating new customers. An effective ethics policy creates a climate for favorable outcomes, and minimizes the likelihood of the unfavorable. Companies can also actively manage for more of the favorable outcomes and less of the harmful. The measurement of outcomes can begin by counting and measuring recent negative outcomes and recent positive outcomes.
