Archive for the ‘Ethics’ Category
Mainstreaming Corporate Responsibility
Three years ago, when The Economist first published a special report on corporate responsibility, the magazine took a highly skeptical view, asking whether, to justify its activities, a company must do anything more than simply earn a profit?[i]
Not surprising, perhaps, that The Economist would echo the orthodox arguments of Milton Friedman, the economist who famously wrote in 1970 that the only “social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” and that corporate social responsibility is a “fundamentally subversive doctrine in a free society.” [ii]
I was intrigued when the British magazine took up corporate responsibility again last month. It seems The Economist has had a change of heart.
The Economist’s 2008 Special Report acknowledges that corporate responsibility is now seen as mainstream by leading companies and concludes that it is worthwhile to single out corporate social responsibility “if it helps businesses look outwards . . . and think imaginatively about risks and opportunities.” [iii]
Why such a conversion in the space of three years? One reason may be the backlash generated by its 2005 Report, which was widely criticized by corporate responsibility practitioners and, reportedly, by members of The Economist’s own editorial staff.
It is more likely that The Economist is simply acknowledging business realities it can no longer ignore. (more…)
Self-Inflicted Harm: From Today’s Headlines (2/6/08)
Two stories in today’s (Feb. 6) New York Times compel me to blog.
Each reinforces our recent posts about self-inflicted harm, but each also provides its own teachable moment.
1. Wachovia Bank
Yesterday we blogged about the tendency of companies and their leaders to ignore a problem that is otherwise evident.
Another principle of crisis management is that companies can be forgiven if people have been hurt: killed, injured, insulted cheated, etc. But companies can’t be forgiven, and won’t be forgiven, if they’re seen not to care that people have been hurt.
Today’s Times, in a front business page story, reports that Wachovia Bank, which last year said it was unaware that fraudulent telemarketers were using the bank’s accounts to steal millions from unsuspecting victims, not only knew but had been put on notice about the fraud. Wachovia is the fourth-largest bank in the US.
The Times notes that newly-released documents in a lawsuit show that high-ranking employees at the bank frequently warned colleagues about telemarketing frauds routed through the accounts. Other banks and federal agencies also notified the bank, but it continued to provide banking services to the companies that helped to steal $400 million, the Times reports.
YIKES!!!! and DOUBLE YIKES!!!
More and More on the Internet, Everyone Knows You’re a Dog
The most memorable sock-puppet of 2007 was John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who was revealed last year to have used a pseudonymous identity for more than seven years on an online message board. Mackey was not the first executive (or person from journalism, politics or the blogosphere) to have done what the New York Times defines as “creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one’s self, allies or company.”
But with the coming of the New Year, we’ve already seen one of the first widely public cases of two people from a non-profit using an astroturfing campaign to anonymously promote their organization.
The organization is GiveWell, which was launched in 2007 and attempts to analyze the effectiveness of other charities, publishing its findings as a resource tool for potential donors. It received a flurry of attention on December 20, with stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal among other media outlets, with some praising their approach and others offended by their harsh criticism of other charity review sites and charities themselves.
But the greater attention came after first one founder, Holden Karnofsky, and then the other, Elie Hassenfeld, admitted that they had used fake identities to promote GiveWell online. (You can see the overview of all activity relating to this crisis on the MetaFilter wiki here, and an example of Karnofksy’s posts on MNSpeak.)
Worth Reading: What Orwell Didn’t Know
What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, edited by András Szántó, Public Affairs Press, 2007.
George Orwell’s seminal essay “Politics and the English Language” noted that precision in language is a reflection of clear thinking. Imprecise language not only reflects weak thinking on the part of the writer or speaker, it causes weak thinking among its audience. Says Orwell:
An effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take a drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
But Orwell wasn’t interested merely in being society’s copy editor. He noted the nefarious consequences of debasement of language in the political realm:
Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.