Let’s do a thought experiment. Focus group moderators will often ask participants to anthropomorphize a company or brand. For example, to probe aspects of corporate character or brand personality, researchers will ask: “If BMW were a person, whom would that person be?” Many companies today have officers or functions for overseeing ethics or compliance, so for this thought experiment, I would ask: “If current business ethics functions were a person, who would that person be?” In such exercises, experts tell us to go with our first impression, trusting what immediately comes to mind as representing some kind of subconscious truth. Without too much pondering, whom do you identify as the personification of the business ethics discipline?
In my case, I began this thought experiment in response to the plethora of business ethics failures that have emerged in only the last few weeks. Facebook was caught trying to plant false stories about Google’s supposedly questionable privacy practices in newspapers, and with influential bloggers. Bad enough that the defining social media company in the world was made to blush over its indiscretions, but that it secretly hired Burson-Marsteller to do the dirty work also implicates one of the world’s largest PR companies in the intentional dissemination of unproven–and for many experts, inaccurate–information. This subterfuge about privacy was played out only a few weeks after it was discovered (not disclosed, but exposed) that Apple’s and Google’s smart phones were tracking customers’ usage location-by location. Both companies claim that this geographic eavesdropping was completely innocent, yet neither provided a coherent rationale for why this capability was developed, and more important, why it was activated in their portable technology without the consent of customers.
Apple only recently surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization, and last week it earned marks as the world’s most recognized, and most valuable brand. More dubiously, last month Greenpeace designated Apple as the ‘least green’ high-tech company (because of “its heavy reliance on ‘dirty-data’ centers). A cover story in BusinessWeek earlier this year investigated the abysmal labor practices in the plants where Apple’s popular iPods, iPhones and iPads are manufactured. The inhuman working conditions (with high rates of suicide) caused Apple to implement new standards with its suppliers, but that Nike and others engaged this issue constructively over a decade ago makes one wonder why a company on the leading edge of the technological revolution should be such a habitual laggard when it comes to human rights and environmental practices. Why would a company that bases its business on elegant design and easy-to-use innovation be so clumsy, inelegant and obsolete in its ethical and compliance practices?
In the last few weeks Sony – which only a decade ago seemed to be the visionary company that Apple has become – stumbled into its own privacy nightmare. While hackers did the damage, stealing personal data and credit card information from millions of PlayStation users, it turns out that the company had been aware of its vulnerability but laggard in its due diligence. Once a gem, Sony is near to becoming a joke because its internal framework for obligations has yet to tame the problematic and still-enduring culture of arrogance.
Sadly, the recent epidemic in ethical lapses is not restricted to the Internet sector. Far graver for being an intentional transgression was the mid-April admission by Unilever and Procter & Gamble to running a cartel in Europe. The packaged goods icons paid $456 million (almost half a billion dollars!) as settlement to European commission regulators for price fixing. How could this happen? Also in mid-April, Suncor again pleaded guilty to improper water management at its tar sands facility in Albert – the fifth known violation in three years involving illegal handling of wastewater, which spilled into the Athabasca River. In mid-March IBM agreed to pay $10 million to “settle allegations that it bribed South Korean and Chinese government officials for more than a decade to win contracts.” Again, how could companies that invest so much in reputation succumb to such dumb violations of their own ethical standards?
Disheartening though it may be, there are many more examples to draw on. It is in this unstable ethical context that I’ve been wondering what has become of the profession and practice. Back to the original question: “If business ethics or responsibility functions in companies were a person, who would that person be?”
From experience, study and current events, I would argue that personification for business ethics would be Mr. Bean. For those who don’t know or remember, he is the wispy bumbler from British TV who plods silently through adventures forever stranding his good intentions on unintended consequences. Mr. Bean drives a Mini (full disclosure, so do I). Rumpled in demeanor and dress, he achieves dollops of mischief without causing offence. Part of the attraction of Mr. Bean’s persona is some obvious innate goodness, but his chief virtue – and comedic twist – is that he ultimately only persists without making a difference.
Mr. Bean does not speak, and when he mutters under his breath, he is not heard. That would seem to be not too far from the reality of corporate ethicists and compliance officers. Several studies examining corporate responsibility suggest that moral criteria are increasingly “taboo” in companies. In fact, managers promoting responsibility increasingly need to camouflage ethics within the strategic considerations of a ‘business case.’ Deprived of moral argument or language, responsibility functions are effectively silenced, no longer challenging or testing ‘business as usual,’ but only certifying it. Despite his good intentions, Mr. Bean gets into mess after mess because he sees situations literally and cannot navigate the ambiguity of consequences. Compliance, while important, similarly misses complexity, measuring legally required outcomes without asking or informing the larger ethical questions that inhere in any strategy.
Like Mr. Bean, we compliance and business ethics types seem anachronistic, still present but without exerting our presence, stumbling along and reacting to mishaps without ever learning the lessons that would prevent the next misadventure.
Have business ethics run out of steam? Who personifies current practice for the profession? And who represents the exemplar for what responsibility functions need to become?
Tags: bad news for business ethicists, business ethics, compliance, ethical imagination, when compliance is merely complicit
This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2011 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Ethics in Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
