We live in a different age. Paul Wolfowitz, the head of the World Bank, has been forced to resign over alleged improprieties involving securing a pay raise and better position for his girlfriend. While international politics and the Iraqi war certainly contributed to his downfall, the board of the World Bank focused on Wolfowitz’s violation of the World Bank’s Code of Conduct.

A special World Bank panel found that Wolfowitz’s involvement in the details of his girlfriend’s compensation package “went beyond the informal advice” given by the bank’s ethics committee and that he “engaged in a de facto conflict of interest.” Both under Wolfowitz’s contract as well as under the Code of Conduct for board officials, he had been required to avoid any conflict of interest.

But Wolfowitz is not the only leader in the hot seat or losing their job because of questionable conduct in the past couple of weeks. Others include:

+ the sobering dismissal of the President of the University of Mary Washington (Fredricksburg, VA) for being arrested for DUI not once, but twice! in just two days;

+ the early resignation of Sir Lord John Browne from the helm of British Petroleum for lying in court (a case which also highlights the perils of being a gay high-profile business executive)

+ the President of Voorhees University (Columbia, South Carolina) found guilty, with $500k in damages assessed for his sexual harassment of a professor;

+ the Chairman and CEO of HBO being pressured into resigning three days after being arrested for assaulting his girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot (as an investigation uncovered that he had previously had a $400k settlement in 1991 at HBO for allegedly choking an office colleague); and

+ to top it all off, the Chairman of the multi-billion Korean industrial conglomerate, Hanwha, being arrested last week and thrown in jail for hiring some goons (and going along with them to get his own licks in) to go beat up some bar patrons who had roughed his son.

Commentary: Hanwha’s Chairman really brings to life the old schoolyard taunt “my dad can beat up your dad.” All of these cases are from the last several weeks alone – and demonstrates in clear fashion that behavior from a CEO/President that once could be “brushed under the rug,” in this era is instead dragged out into the open and quickly becomes grounds for termination based on legal or moral clauses.