Ethical Dilemma with Stakeholders
You're the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Your best-selling drug ($2B annual revenue, used by 4 million patients for chronic pain) has…
As CEO, my primary obligation is to the patients. While a 40% stock drop is a financial catastrophe, a cover-up that leads to preventable deaths is a corporate death sentence and a moral failure. If we "wait for more data" and another patient dies during that window, we move from "negligence" to "criminal intent."Read the full answer
As CEO, I would not wait six months and I would not let the board delay disclosure while patients remain exposed to an unreported serious risk. I would treat this as a patient-safety, regulatory, legal, and trust crisis—not merely a financial-risk issue. My guiding decisions would be: Patient safety comes first.Read the full answer