In a post yesterday on TheAtlantic.com, Daniel Indiviglio posed the question “Does Hurd’s New Oracle Gig Prove Business Ethics Don’t Matter?” Indiviglio noted that while Mark Hurd’s missteps at H-P may have been “incredibly dumb”; the decisions he made which led to his ouster did not relate to his business acumen.

Indiviglio noted that it would appear that Oracle “thinks Hurd’s talent for business-making trumps his poor [ethical] decision-making elsewhere.” While recognizing that in certain professional service businesses, such as auditing, integrity is everything; conversely in other types of businesses where profit motives may not be connected to good ethics, an emphasis on integrity may not jeopardize business as much and as “long as poor decisions don’t compromise profit, they [business ethics] will eventually be forgotten.”