Just because we can

In his blog post today, Seth Godin reminds use that some industries get away with ignoring customer satisfaction because their customers will use them only once and only for a short period of time.

Maybe the same forces are at play with employers who ignore employee satisfaction (and ethical business practices) because their employees are seasonal or temporary, and won’t be back next year.

Just because we can get away with it doesn’t mean we should do it. And if we decide to do it, we must remember that, in this new interconnected world, we are much more vulnerable to a disruption. Why not simply do the right thing and treat our employees and customers the way we’d want to be treated?

Almanacs

I have recently been involved in a project to create an almanac.

I can’t share the topic of the almanac until closer to publication. But it’s not one that contains astronomical and meteorological data. Not one that will be revised yearly.

Simply one that contains facts as we know them today. No opinions. No projections. Just facts. Things we know for sure. Data that cannot be challenged by reasonable people.

In these times of political turmoil, of social injustice, of health concerns, I think we need more almanacs. Places we can go to get the facts on a specific topic.

Almanacs are like a vaccines against conspiracy theories.

Reading list

I get a lot of my business ethics insights from books that have nothing to do with business ethics.

In fact, I suspect that people who write business ethics books derived many of their insights from other areas – like culture, politics, religion, and sports.

What was your favorite book of 2021? Did it contain, by any chance, a business ethics lesson?

Let’s build a small reading list! Share your favorite book and its lesson in the comment section below.

Cooperstown, performance, and trust

The big story in baseball this week is the induction of David “Big Papi” Ortiz in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

But for me, the bigger story is how Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens did not make the cut. Bonds hit 221 more home runs than Ortiz. Clemens won a record seven Cy Young awards. But their accomplishments were tarnished by the performance enhancing drugs scandals of the early 2000s*.

This is a good reminder of the important difference between a breach of performance and a breach of trust at work. An employee with performance problem will often get a second chance. An employee who breaks your trust will be fired on the spot.

* It is not clear why rumors of Ortiz testing positive for PE drugs in 2003 did not tarnish his record to the same extent.

Keep it fresh

If a business keeps selling the exact same product or service for 10 years (think Blockbuster), chances are that a competitor with a fresh offering will displace it.

Support functions in a business (like HR, finance, and ethics & compliance) don’t have the same competition. So many of them to the exact same thing, over and over again. Same onboarding, same reports, same training – while the world is changing.

Eventually this creates a drag on the business, giving an edge to competitors with better support functions. If we don’t recognize where that edge comes from, we will simply ask the sales force to “sell harder”. That pressure is likely to lead to wrongdoing (remember the fraud triangle?), which must be addressed by – you guessed it: stale support functions. Talk about a vicious cycle.

Never lose sight that changes in the marketplace impact more than your products and services; they also impact vital support functions like ethics & compliance.

Keep it fresh.

HT to Seth Godin

The appearance thereof

A good conflict of interest policy should seek to eliminate not only actual conflicts but also the appearance thereof.

This is what the US Congress is trying to do by banning members from trading individual stocks. It is not enough to review a trade after it has been made because, in many cases, the trade was made after a member received information from a classified briefing.

Take a look at your conflict policies, gift policies, even your anti-corruption policies. Are they filled with detailed prescriptions about who-can-receive-what-from-whom-and-under-what-amount? If so, it could be a sign that the activities you are trying to regulate might simply need to be prohibited.

Is an unethical situation at work keeping you hostage?

The rabbi who helped his congregants escape the hostage standoff in Texas a few days ago credited the security training he received for keeping everyone alive.

When we practice something in advance, we can think more clearly when facing the real situation. We can also act more quickly. This is why military personnel, firefighters, and other first responders use most of their spare time to practice over and over again.

In corporate ethics, we can do the same thing. We can practice, in advance, how to respond to ethical dilemmas. Perhaps the best training in this area comes from Mary Gentile with her book Giving Voice to Values. Gentile starts with the assumption that most of us know the difference between right and wrong. What we need, she says, is to practice, in advance, how we would respond if we were asked to lie, cheat or steal – or if we observed someone else doing these things. If properly trained, we are more likely to respond in a way that will keep us and the company safe when the real thing happens.

Don’t wait to be “held hostage” by an unethical situation at work before you learn how to escape it.

Time to bend the arc

The post below was originally published on January 16, 2017

A century before Martin Luther King’s “Where do we go from here?” speech of August 1967, Theodore Parker said the following:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

The arc doesn’t bend on its own. The bend is created by the courageous and persistent work of a minority, who possesses a moral imagination capable of seeing a future world that is better than today’s.

And so do we all have a responsibility to see the injustice about us, and to work towards its elimination, even if we never enjoy the fruits of our labor.

You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to evade it. — Rabbi Tarfon

Millions of you

Each year, colleges and universities produce millions of graduates.

If you are one of those graduates in 2022, you probably want to work for a company that makes the world a better place. It’s a distinguishing trait of those born in the late ’90s.

The New Humanitarian identified the top 10 global crises to watch in 2022. Each represents an opportunity to do work that can make the world a better place.

You alone can’t solve all of these crises.

But the millions of you can.

Time for E&C career paths

Not too long ago, the ethics and compliance profession did not exist.

Then, when the first E&C professionals were appointed in corporations, they often worked alone or in very small groups.

Today, it is common for big corporations to have large networks of E&C professionals. Many business schools and law school offer compliance degrees. There are professional associations offering certifications.

So now we have young people graduating with compliance certificates, becoming members of ECI, joining the E&C department of a multinational, and, after a few years, looking for advancement.

What most of them find is that companies have not yet created career paths for E&C professionals. They see their friends in finance, HR, and legal participate in rotation programs that lead to promotions – while they stay in place. Eventually, their path to growth leads them to join another organization.

Our profession is still young but the time has come for organizations to create internal career paths.