Please Keep Your Its and It's Straight!

Michael Tomberlin did an excellent interview recently with John Knapp, Ethics and Leadership Professor at the Brock School of Business at Samford University. Knapp is also the director of the Frances Marlin Mann Center for Ethics and Leadership.

The quote from John Knapp that headlines the article is one worth remembering: "Unethical behavior can sometimes be profitable in the short run. It is seldom profitable over the long term."

In the article, Tomberlin offers Bernard Madoff and Marcus Schrenker as good examples of people who made huge profits in the short term but became objects of shame and derision in the long term.

Unfortunately, Tomberlin remembered his ethics but forgot his good grammar when he wrote this statement:

"Of course, you don't have to be an ethics professor to see people exhibiting unethical behavior--whether its Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme or Marcus Schrenker bailing from an airplane over Harpersville...."

For the record, "it's" as used in this sentence is a contraction of "it" and "is," and needs the apostrophe to be correct.

It should read: "...whether it's Bernard Madoff's alleged...."

I might add that profit gained solely through greed can turn out to be its own worst enemy--or something like that.