As an American child of the Fifties and Sixties, I grew up on westerns on TV and in movie theaters. John Wayne, Marshal Dillon in “Gunsmoke,” the “Bonanza” Cartwrights. Good guys in white hats. Not until recently, though, did I hear about “cowboy ethics.”
It seems that a veteran institutional investor, Jim Owen, a former partner in NWQ Investment Management, has started a nonprofit Center for Cowboy Ethics and Leadership and written a book called Cowboy Ethics: What Wall Street Can Learn from the Code of the West, among others.
I ran across cowboy ethics belatedly from a news story on some people in Wyoming trying to write some of this philosophy into the state’s statute books.
If you’ve got a bit of cowboy in your background, you can learn the basics of cowboy ethics from Owen’s Ten Principles to Live By. I’ll share three of them:
- Ride for the brand.
- Talk less and say more.
- Remember that some things aren’t for sale.
In an age of corporate scandals, revisiting your core values seems appropriate.
Tags: Ethics, Institutional investors, Investor relations, Scandals
