Societal issues are also the ultimate test of corporate citizenship—of whether a company can carry out the essential mission of global capitalism: fusing high performance with high integrity and sound risk management. 

Now that military strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has declared his intention to run for Egypt’s presidency, he should keep something in mind: Both Hosni Mubarak and his successor, Mohammed Morsi, weren’t only ousted from the country’s highest office because they suppressed political and constitutional rights, writes Ben Heineman. They also fell because fitful economic reforms failed to address poverty and near-poverty, high unemployment, extremely high youth unemployment, and unchecked inflation.

Every casual reader of business news knows that JP Morgan Chase & Co. is in a world of legal hurt.  But, it is not alone.  Many other major  financial institutions — Bank of America,  Citigroup, HSBC, Barclay’s, Wells Fargo, UBS, etc. — have their share of big dollar controversies with regulators and private claimants.  The immediate news coverage is focused on the size of financial penalties for the institutions,  on the potential civil or criminal culpability of  bank officials and on the reputational harm to both the bank and its senior officers.

The international media have made a huge story out of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's power-consolidating decrees and the balloting on his proposed constitution. How the fundamental political disputes -- between factions of the religious and secular, Islamic and Christian, and civilian and military, and between rich and poor and urban and rural -- will be resolved in the Middle East's most populous nation is seen as a harbinger for the political impact of the Arab Spring.

Just after the New Year, President Obama will have to decide whether to take a dramatic, high-stakes gamble on a very unsexy topic: a U.S.-EU free trade agreement. It will be one of the key high-risk, high-reward choices of his second term, writes Ben Heineman.

"The role of shareholders in corporate governance has become one of the hot-button issues following the credit melt-down and economic crisis. Would more active involvement by shareholders have helped to prevent or lessen the crisis?"

"Whether in the public sector or the private sector, leaders must at a minimum have the intellectual courage and strength to form red teams and blue teams which fight over the fundamentals of the analysis and isolate and challenge the assumptions which, when eroded, erode in turn the apparent precision of mathematical or systems models."

"The pervasive problem, however, is that anti-corruption rhetoric exceeds commitment and accomplishment on all fronts. Corruption is deeply entrenched because it is based on lust for money and for power."

"The most immediate and direct step for U.S. companies is to enlist (and test) the new administration to use its muscle to prevent U.S. business and labor from being disadvantaged by "protectionist" nonenforcement of the international commitment to stop developed-world bribery in other industrialized nations."

"The irony of the G20s silence about erratic and incomplete enforcement of the OECD anti-bribery convention is that the summit made a big deal about "taking action against...tax havens," citing an OECD list of nations not conforming to international standards for exchange of tax information."