Mark Pastin

Mark Pastin walked away from a full, tenured professorship. When Mark left academia, he was serving as founding Director of the Lincoln Center for Ethics and Professor of Management at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He is the author of over 100 academic and trade publications.

Mark left academia to prove that it is possible to create lasting ethical change in organizations. While Mark was transitioning from academia to his current work, he worked as a newspaper columnist, investment banker, and international consultant.  Since 1993, Mark has served as Chief Executive Officer of the Council of Ethical Organizations, a non-profit organization dedicated to promote ethics in business, government and the professions.

Throughout these careers, Mark has pursued practical approaches to ethical issues. His research focuses on two topics. The first topic is how to gain ethical insight and the second is how to translate that insight into ethical action.

When working toward his Ph.D. at Harvard University, Mark studied under two of the leading ethicists of the past hundred years, Roderick Firth and John Rawls.  His studies focused on the unique human attributes that allow individuals to gain insight into ethical issues.

Mark realized that you could not claim ethical insight if this insight did not translate into ethical action. Simply put, the only relevant laboratory for ethical knowledge is the world in which we live and work. It is this insight that drove Mark to build a global consultancy in the area of organizational ethics.

This consultancy has spanned five continents, over 30 Fortune 500 companies, numerous smaller companies, domestic and international federal governments and two Presidential campaigns. He has advised corporations and governments in the United States, Brazil, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Germany, Korea, Belgium, Australia, France and Taiwan. His clients have included such corporations as American Express, Motorola, Medtronic, National Medical Enterprises, Intel, GE, NYNEX, Caterpillar, Oxford Health, MCI, Lincoln Electric, Caterpillar, GTECH, Texas Instruments, GlaxoSmithKline, the Williams Companies, National Health Laboratories, Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, Cadbury Schweppes, John Deere and many others. His ethics work brought him considerable acclaim in Japan, where he spoke to a single audience of 10,000.

Mark’s work and publications have been featured in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times and BusinessWeek. He has received support from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Earhart Foundation, the Exxon Foundation and other sources.

Through his work, Mark’s developed tools to help organizations gain and act on ethical insight. These tools bring about ethical improvement by enhancing the overall performance of an organization.

Mark is based in Alexandria, VA.