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June 2nd, 2010
Coincidence sometimes holds surprising significance. In only a few short months we have seen icon corporations on both sides of the carbon-energy complex stumble and fall. First, Toyota took a global reputation-beating as problems with accelerators, brakes, and ineffectual-quick-fixes plagued models across both its mass and luxury brands. Now BP is writhing in the public spotlight over its own cumbersome response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s as if the environmental gods, having taken umbrage at Copenhagen’s tepid response to Global Warming, have unleashed the fates to make mockery of two of the most prestigious players in the carbon economy.
If the karma seems justified, the lessons nonetheless have yet to be learned. Expert analysis and debate about causes will likely take years, but it is already clear that both companies over-extended themselves, operating with the hyper efficiencies demanded by global economies of scale to the point where capacities for dealing with mistakes, accidents, or engineering flaws, became severely curtailed.
By any measure both companies cast a huge ecological footprint, and both market products to customers that by aggregation are at the heart of our global sustainability quandaries. We consumers are obviously complicit in this exchange, but by their simultaneous missteps Toyota and BP are exposing just how fast that precarious threshold of viability is approaching. Still in the aftershocks of the financial crisis, global society again encounters the publicly shared risks from companies that are “too big to fail.” Especially with BP, the real lesson is that the failures by some these companies are just too big to be contained.
Another similarity binding Toyota and BP…
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Tags: carbon economy, fallible managers, greenwashing, just-in-time, limits of technology
Posted in In the News | No Comments »
May 31st, 2010
One of the difficulties we have in sustaining ethical conversation on perplexing issues is that our social discourse today is patterned much more on confrontation and competition than on understanding and collaboration. Whether it is in relation to BP’s oil spill in the Gulf, or to the Vatican’s handling of the clergy sexual abuse scandal, it seems that we use our outrage primarily to condemn those who hold a perspective different than our own. Whatever the ethical claim of the issue, it becomes secondary, because what matters most is scoring points against rivals.
As Roman Catholic, I could not help but follow with a heavy heart the articles and commentary untangling the problem of pedophilia in the Church. Almost as disorienting as this tragedy has been the reaction amongst Catholics posting comments on these articles or analyses. All too often the posts evaded the key ethical questions posed by the situation and instead sought to vilifying or caricature those on the opposite side of the liberal-conservative spectrum. Outrage has become an excuse for venting rage. Even within an institution defined by a morality of compassion and forgiveness, we seem unable to practice the generosity in our discourse that would suggest a common commitment to principles, and a shared valuing of the historical gifts of the institution.
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Tags: accountability for posts, Catholic Church, corporate dialogue, ethics of discourse, focus groups, liberals versus conservatives, outrage, pedophilia crisis, vilifying others
Posted in Dialogue | No Comments »
May 31st, 2010
John Dalla Costa is the founder of the Centre for Ethical Orientation (CEO), a Toronto-based consultancy working with business, the public sector and non-government groups to foster ethical excellence in operations and outcomes.
In addition to models for governance and organizational change, CEO has designed and developed processes for integrating ethics within strategy and culture.
The author of four books published internationally, John has spoken at conferences around the world including the Bilbao Conference on “Business as Calling” in Spain, the Vienna Peace Summit in Austria, the London Form in the U.K., The Jakarta Interfaith Dialogue in Indonesia, and at the Global Business Forum at the United Nations Millennial Summit in New York.
John is a founding faculty member and the ethics instructor for the Director’s College (the joint venture between the Conference Board of Canada and McMaster’s Business School advancing board governance and social performance). Since 2008 he has also taught ethics and social responsibility in the MBA program at the Schulich School of Business at York University.
John is a graduate of the Owner/President Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School. In 2001, John completed a Masters of Divinity Degree (Summa Cum Laude) at Regis College at the University of Toronto. He was also inducted into the Jesuit honour society Alpha Sigma Nu. He is now working on a doctorate, exploring the interfaith resources for advancing sustainable development.
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May 30th, 2010
In the early days of the financial crisis I managed to pull down the ethical codes of conduct from both Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Having saved each on PDF, these documents are now collectibles since both websites have been wiped clean of all the postings that were in place when these companies were quintessential Wall Street players. Interestingly, even a cursory analysis of these codes suggests that they are the products of some legal boilerplate. Both documents first invoked the authority of the board to compel compliance. Both stipulated terms for avoiding conflict-of-interest and assuming personal responsibility for integrity. And – not without some irony as it turned out – both demanded that all employees pledge to not place the firm’s assets at risk in any way.
Of course, these firms did not fail so catastrophically simply because of inadequate codes, whether or not they were taken seriously. What we can discern from these genetically-twinned documents is that organizations continue to take a boilerplate approach to their ethics, regardless of the strengths and weaknesses relative to that firm, despite what pressures may be uniquely challenging for that industry, or without regard for the robustness necessary to bring a company’s ethical capacities up to the level of its risks or import to the community. Any regeneration of ethical business needs to get beyond the usual generic terms of values or codes, preparing a much more customized and responsive approach that takes ethical investigation and moral development as seriously as continuous learning.
Our great religious traditions are a potential source for learning,
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Tags: codes, compliance, corporate conscience, moral care, rights and responsibilities, stages of ethical development
Posted in Ethics in Practice | No Comments »
May 29th, 2010
 The G 20 summit (soon to be replayed in Toronto) is supposed to be a ritual of global democracy, bringing together leaders of the world’s major economies to work together to solve urgent problems. Leave aside the irony that the people supposedly represented are increasingly held back further and further from the proceedings. The more ludicrous presumption implied by security arrangements is that the threats to social order are outside the barricades. What we’ve learned in the last two years as the financial crisis has continued to roil around the world is that the real anarchists are not the rock throwing youths wearing baklavas, but rather the bankers and bureaucrats ensconced in the establishment who make their bets for profit without any accountability for the consequences.
My thesaurus explains anarchy as chaos, turmoil, disorder, tumult and mayhem. Sounds like another day at the office with Goldman Sachs. Another descriptor for anarchy in the thesaurus is lawlessness. The New York Times reported that a group of bankers founded a new lobbying organization in the very early and darkest days of the financial crisis. Even as half the companies represent were receiving bailout funds, they had the strategic acuity (and time on their hands) to begin preempting Congress from making the regulatory changes that the situation warranted. Although legal, such self-serving lawlessness-through-lobbying is a form of stealth anarchy, happily risking further chaos to preserve faulty tactics for generating profits. Street protesters could never in their wildest dreams hope to unleash such havoc. Meanwhile, for wearing pinstripes, almost all of those who caused the financial maelstrom not only got to keep their jobs, bonuses, and privileges, but also inveigled their demands into the reforms meant to regulate them.
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 Tags: anarchists, bankers, risk to shareholders
Posted in In the News | No Comments »
May 28th, 2010
 Even as BP’s oil spill continues to contaminate the Gulf, experts have already begun their postmortem exploring the deficiencies within the organization that have befuddled its disastrous response to the crisis. While it is vital that we examine the technical and regulatory aspects of this tragedy, we need to remember that the outcome in the Gulf is in fact the result of innumerable business decisions undertaken over the last decade. At root, BP’s actions before and after the rig explosion demonstrate a paucity of resources as well as imagination. It’s hard to believe that a company that earned $5.6 billion in the most recent quarter before the explosion could be so little prepared, and have such puny assets in place for responding. Accidents happen. But the response is no accident. This is the true scandal – not the situation in the Gulf as bad as that is, but the larger systemic failure in which this operational calamity long incubated.
What decisions led to this chronic indecisiveness? After years of “lean and mean” reengineering, companies like BP have come to excel at squeezing the most output from minimal investment. What this managerial theory failed to provide is in fact a safety valve — a capacity within management and among employees — to imagine those unexpected yet inevitable disruptions that complicate the unfolding of perfectly imagined efficiency.
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Tags: BP ethics, lean and mean
Posted in Management Studies | No Comments »
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