One of the great challenges of any business function is overcoming functional silos and working in a more integrated way with the organization as a whole. This is particularly difficult for functions, like ethics and corporate responsibility, that in many companies were either created or have grown as a response to external stimuli or events (can anyone say "Federal Sentencing Guidelines" or "Enron"?) The newest print edition of Ethical Corporation magazine carries a piece I just wrote addressing this issue. It identifies the desire on the part of ethics and corporate responsibility professionals to become more fully integrated into the core business of their companies. But it also identifies some promising developments that suggest movement in that direction. Have a read and let me know what you think.

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The recently announced offer by Wall Street financiers and private equity firms to buy Texas electric utility TXU is not your typical leveraged buyout, by any definition. It is the largest LBO in history -- but that only makes it interesting as an answer to a Trivial Pursuit question a few years from now (until it is supplanted by a larger deal). What truly makes one sit up and take notice is the inclusion of prominent environmental groups in the deliberations that culminated in the TXU offer by Texas Pacific Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company (KKR). I address the significance of these events, and the interesting juxtaposition of this green LBO with Al Gore's recent Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth", in my most recent column for Ethical Corporation. You can read it by clicking here. Let me know what you think.

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