Minnesota's Corporate Directors Academy, a project of the Caux Round Table and the Hendrickson Institute for Ethical Leadership at St. Mary's University of Minnesota, has started producing directors purportedly trained in "moral capitalism". It's about developing boards not just focused on the financials, but also on ethics, governance and working with all stakeholders and society.

Moral capitalism is the cause championed by Stephen Young, global executive director of the Caux Round Table, a, a loose network of more than 1000 business representatives mostly from the US, Europe and Japan. Training directors in ethics is a subject very close to Young's heart. When I interviewed him earlier this year, he told me that the fish rots from the head so directors needed to be schooled in ethics, particularly now that more business schools were taking it up. Ethics and corporate social responsibility, Young said, was about risk management. Companies operating as single cell organisms were guilty of bad risk management and betraying shareholders. "A company cut off from its customers is a failure; a company in adversarial conflict with its employees has a lot of problems; a company that nobody in the credit world trusts and that can't borrow money has problems; a company that has an adversarial relationship with town and local government has regulatory issues."