Archive for the ‘accountability’ Category
Ethics and the Challenges of Scale
Filed under: accountability, complexity, corporations, employees, management |
Comments (2) I’m currently attending the Global Ethics Summit in New York. In reality, despite its name, the GES is not just about ethics per se, but about ethics and legal compliance. Those of us who spend time thinking about corporate behaviour in terms of ethics are sometimes tempted to downplay the significance of legal compliance. After all, “compliance” just means “following the law,” and it’s tempting to think that following the law is a pretty low aspiration. After all, shouldn’t we be able to take for granted that companies will follow the law? Shouldn’t the real discussion be about the subtler ethical issues that pop up in areas not covered by law? The answer is not so clear, especially when we think about really big companies.
The first session I attended here yesterday got me thinking about the challenges of compliance, and the challenges faced by big companies precisely because of their scale. The panel was called “Compliance 2011: What’s Next?” and its members included representatives from three truly enormous companies: Kathleen Edmond, the Chief Ethics Officer for Best Buy; Odell Guyton, Director of Compliance for Microsoft; and Haydee Olinger, who is Vice President & Chief Compliance Officer for McDonald’s.
My thinking about scale was stimulated by two comments by panelists. First, Best Buy’s Kathleen Edmond mentioned that her company has over 170,000 employees. Just imagine the challenges that number implies for the people who are going to be held accountable for the company’s behaviour. Imagine being the mayor of a city with 170,000 citizens, and your job is to ensure that all of those citizens know about all the laws that apply to your city and its residents, and that none of those citizens ever breaks any of those laws. And add onto that the likelihood that you as mayor and your city as a whole will be held responsible for the bad behaviour of any of those citizens. Finally, imagine that the citizenry of your city has a yearly turnover rate of, say, 75% (Edmond said that Best Buy’s employee turnover rate is something between 60 and 70%, which she said is well below the retail industry’s average). That implies a tremendous challenge for education and enforcement.
The second comment of interest was from Haydee Olinger of McDonald’s. She pointed out that McDonald’s has “hundreds of thousands” of suppliers. And each of those suppliers is likely to have hundreds or maybe thousands of employees. That means that the quality and safety of McDonald’s product depends on the good behaviour of a lot of people. The same goes for keeping the fast-food giant out of legal trouble, because there are lots of ways in which McDonald’s could end up on the hook, legally, for problems the root causes of which lie with a supplier’s behaviour. The result is that an enormous amount of energy has to go into selecting those suppliers, teaching them about McDonald’s standards, and then enforcing those standards.
Now, we shouldn’t be fooled though into thinking that the problems unique to giant corporations amount to a criticism of such companies. Because the problem really lies with the amount of commerce done, rather than with the size of the organization that does it. If Best Buy’s 170,000 employees were instead employed by 170 companies, each with 1000 employees, there would still be a total of 170,000 potential wrongdoers. The only thing that would really change is that instead of one giant employer with a unified system for training those employees and monitoring them, you’d have 170 small businesses, each of which would likely struggle with figuring out the best way to do so. Likewise, consider the millions of burgers McDonald’s sells each year. If they were instead sold by a few thousand small burger joints, all those ingredients would still have to be bought from a massive number of suppliers. The difference would be that none of those small restaurants would be likely to have the resources required to screen, select, educate, and monitor those suppliers in any rigorous way. They’d probably just, you know, buy stuff from from them, and hope for the best.
So in terms of compliance, while size brings challenges, it also clearly brings advantages.
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By the way, Best Buy’s Kathleen Edmond writes her own blog, which is well worth a look.
Should Celebrities Regret Singing for Gadhafi’s Family?
Filed under: accountability, boycott, brands, charity, entertainment, ethics, excuses, international, profits |
Leave a comment I blogged nearly two weeks ago about the Ethics of Doing Business in Libya. The concern there was about the ethics of involvement in Libya by, well, “businesses” in the traditional, i.e., corporate, sense of that word. But the controversy that emerged short after that, and that continues still, concerns high-profile members of the entertainment business — celebrities like Usher, 50 Cent, and Mariah Carey. Basically, it has come to light that a whole fistful of such stars have, at various times, done private concerts for members of the Gadhafi family. And now, in light of the continuing violence in Libya, most of those stars are expressing regret and doing things like donating the money to charity. (For details, see Public consequences of pop stars’ private gigs, by By Reed Johnson and Rick Rojas for the Los Angeles Times.)
A few people have pointed out that the timing of the celebs’ crisis of conscience is just a little bit off. Libya has been a dictatorship for decades, and its leader has been a vicious madman just as long. As Tim Cavanaugh wrote on his blog at Reason, “Even assuming Qaddafi is so toxic you can’t with sound conscience take his dinars, that didn’t just become the case a few weeks ago.” If it’s right to give the money back now, it was likely wrong to take it in the first place.
But we can also question whether anyone does, or should, give much of a hoot over where these celebs sing, or for whom. The LA Times quotes Sting — a star with a reputation for charity work and activism — as defending having sung for the daughter of Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov:
Sting addressed criticism saying he was “well aware of the Uzbek president’s appalling reputation in the field of human rights as well as the environment. I made the decision to play there in spite of that.” He added, “I have come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counterproductive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art and as a result become even more closed, paranoid and insular.”
The man has a point. Though it may sound like a self-interested argument, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad one.
(Cavanaugh’s blog entry has a wonderful quote from, of all people, Adolf Hitler, who shrugged off artists behaving in ways that might have taken by him to be treasonous: “I don’t take any of that seriously. We should never judge artists by their political views. The imagination they need for their work deprives them of the ability to think in realistic terms.”)
But this leads me wonder: just what is the objection to singers singing for dictators? Is the money the problem, or is it having sung for (or more generally having done business with, or having provided a service for) an evil man’s family? Consider: if the money really is the problem — i.e., if this really is a case of filthy lucre — then donating the money to charity really does utterly absolve the stars in question of any blame. Or at least it would if the timing weren’t so questionable. Singing for free would also be OK. Indeed, if the money is all that matters, then stars might have a positive obligation to sing for wealthy tyrants and give the money to charity. After all, what could be better than squeezing a few million out of a mad dictator’s family in order to do something good with it? And if singing for free (or singing for money and donating it to charity) isn’t OK, then that seems to imply that the money isn’t the problem either.
Regulating Wall Street Bonuses
Filed under: accountability, competition, decision-making, employees, finance, government, pay, regulations, wages, white collar crime |
Comments (5) The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has just announced its intention to exercise oversight over levels of pay on Wall Street. Is this an example of overreaching regulation, or of justified intervention in the public interest?
Here are the details, from Ben Protess and Susanne Craig, on the NYT‘s DealBook blog: S.E.C. Proposes Crackdown on Wall Street Bonuses:
Lavish Wall Street bonuses, long the scorn of lawmakers and shareholders, have met a new foe: the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The agency on Wednesday proposed a crackdown on hefty compensation awarded at big banks, brokerage firms and hedge funds — a move intended to rein in pay packages that encouraged excessive risk-taking before the financial crisis.
The proposal would for the first time require Wall Street firms to file detailed accounts of their bonuses with the S.E.C., which could then ban any awards it deemed excessive. The rules would be aimed at top executives and hundreds of rank-and-file employees who receive incentive-based pay….
In general, we should probably have as our starting point a healthy skepticism about government attempts to regulate pay in particular industries. Remuneration for high-level jobs is typically based on some combination of rewarding past performance and incentivizing future performance, in addition to sensitivity to things like skill, experience, and the scarcity of the particular talents the job requires. And it’s highly unlikely, again speaking in generalities, that government agencies are going to have the right information and motives to allow them to determine with any degree of precision and efficiency just what a private company’s pay structure should be. Now of course governments aren’t the only ones who could err in setting up compensation schemes; private companies are perfectly capable of screwing that up pretty badly themselves. But for the most part, if private companies screw up in that regard, it’s their shareholders that should hold them accountable, just as it is shareholders who ought to hold them accountable for any other foolish spending.
But there are likely to be justified exceptions to the general presumption in favour of the government taking hands-off approach to compensation. If it is the case — and this seems to be the S.E.C.’s conclusion, here — that compensation schemes in a particular industry are seriously and chronically causing harm beyond the walls of the organization, that seems to be a pretty good argument in favour of government action. This is especially true when the damage being done is not “merely” damage to particular individuals or groups, but to the stability of the economy as a whole. And as Protess and Craig point out, “The move by regulators to have more say on Wall Street pay highlights the huge role financial institutions play in the economy.” That is what arguably makes the harm done by Wall Street compensation not just a matter of private wrongs, but of public ones.
But of course, this argument doesn’t mean the S.E.C. should rush in like a bull in a china shop. All of the concerns mentioned above still apply — there are reasons why Wall Street firms have the compensation policies they have, and it’s pretty likely that at least some of those reasons are pretty good ones related to the necessities of the industry. Indeed, the S.E.C.’s chairwoman, Mary L. Schapiro, says that “This is an area where we want to be very attuned to unintended consequences.” The S.E.C.’s objectives here, seem to be good ones; the question will be whether the quality of the agency’s methods live up to the nobility of its goals.
Russian Business Ethics
Filed under: accountability, corporations, economics, ethics, international, transparency, trust |
Comments (3) 
We can learn a lot about the fundamental nature of business ethics by looking at its operation in various countries at different levels of economic development and with very different histories. Former members of the USSR are a good place to start. Russia, for example, was once at the heart of the Soviet empire, yet today — 20 years after the fall of that empire — Russia continues to struggle. The country’s per capita GDP is middling (i.e., about 1/3 of American GDP), and the economy has been growing steadily for years, but it’s far from free of problems. Law and order (including the functioning of its basic democratic institutions) continues to be a challenge there. Note also that Russia fares very badly on Transparency International’s Corruption Index.
So what about the role of business ethics in civilizing (and hopefully growing) the Russian economy?
See this story by Khristina Narizhnaya, for the Moscow Times: Business Ethics Get Codified
Business ethics are improving in Russia, on paper at least.
More local companies are emulating Western standards and adopting ethics codes to help them operate in a corrupt environment and create the appearance of trustworthiness.
Such codes regulate everything a company’s employees do, from how they dress to how they act in case a bribe is offered….
In the last three years, state companies, including Sberbank and Rosneft, have established codes for their workers as part of President Dmitry Medvedev’s initiative to increase transparency. Gazprom has begun putting together its ethics guidelines, which could take more than a year to deploy. Private companies have followed suit….
The entire piece is interesting and well worth reading, but I think couple of issues in particular are worth thinking about. First, what is the point of all this explicit attention to ethics? Interestingly, at least some Russian business people seem to be aware that ethics is a fundamental building block for real success in business:
“It is good for the image — and clients, investors and partners respond with trust,” said Econika chief executive Andrei Iliopulo.
(The reference to “image” is a distraction, there. Iliopulo’s main point is about trust.)
Others see ethics as an absolute necessity on a macro scale, for the Russian economy as a whole:
Some experts see the ethics code trend as an example of transforming the economic model from wild capitalism to socially responsible business.
“Business feels this need and tries to fulfill it,” said Alexander Sergeyev, a professor at the School of Higher Economics. “It might seem strange, but people like to live by the rules….”
And then there’s the question of scope, and focus. What are the key issues to focus on? As the story notes, ethics codes can cover everything from conflict of interest to social responsibility:
[British-Russian conglomerate] TNK-BP’s code outlines a set of principles covering ethical conduct, employee behavior, external relationships, health, safety, security and environmental performance, control and finance.
That’s quite a range of issues. And when thinking about a country still struggling to “find its feet” in terms of business ethics, we might well want to ask about priority-setting. So, question for discussion: of the various issues mentioned above, which one should Russian businesses be focusing on? I’m not suggesting single-mindedness. But for the good of the Russian population as a whole, which business ethics issues is likely to be the most important?
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(For more on the importance of business ethics for economic development, see Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s “Does Business Ethics Make Economic Sense?”)
Ethical Constraints on a Corporation Without Humans
Filed under: accountability, decision-making, personhood, technology |
Comments (11) 
The buzz over the appearance by IBM’s computer, Watson, on Jeopardy last week has me thinking about the capacities of computers.
Could a computer run a company, and if so what would we want to say about the ethical constraints on such a company? Well, one obvious worry is that ethics requires exercising judgment. Stanley Fish, in an editorial in the NY Times a couple of days ago (“What Did Watson the Computer Do?“) argues that while computers (from laptops on up through to Watson) are very good at is following rules. What they’re bad at, Fish points out, is adapting to new situations and figuring out whether the current situation is a valid exception to the rule.
So, let’s imagine a corporation without humans. It’s not science fiction, and it’s not far-fetched. I don’t know of any in operation today, but they’re certainly possible. There are some corporations today that, while they currently do have significant human personnel, could likely survive and continue to generate revenue for at least several days without human intervention. For example, basically any company that sells a product that can be bought and shipped via the Internet, such as ebooks or music files, can operate for at least a while without humans. (If you’re skeptical about that, please accept it for now, for the sake of argument.)
So imagine a guy named Dave sets up a company selling audio books. He builds a website, which allows customers to search, find the books they want, pay online, and receive the audio book as a download. Maybe he has a web-roaming software ‘bot looking around the web to find out which print books are popular enough for his online store to feature, and maybe even a decent piece of text-to-voice software to generate the voice files, without the need for human input.
Now, as long as Dave is around, monitoring the system, we’re likely to say that Daves “is” the company, and the computer is a tool he uses. And any ethical questions about the company’s conduct should be addressed to Dave. But what if Dave dies? The computer system would keep on chugging along, making money (barring failures of hardware or software). What ethical questions does such an autonomous electronic corporation pose? If the computer harms no one, and violates no rights, is it acting “ethically”, or does that notion require the kind of judgment that Fish says is impossible for computers? Would this robo-corporation have ethical obligations, or is the very idea of a non-human construct having ethical obligations nonsense? And if it’s nonsense, then does it make sense for corporations to have obligations, or are a corporation’s obligations merely the obligations of the persons that make it work?
Certifying Virtue
Filed under: accountability, brands, certification, consumers, labelling, standards, virtue |
Comments (2) 
Two weeks ago I was at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, in part to participate in a panel discussion called “Certifying Virtue.” The panel was basically about the challenges faced by various attempts to certify particular consumer goods as having been ethically produced.
My excellent co-panelists were Greg Dees (director of Duke’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship) and Tim Büthe (Assistant Professor in Duke’s Political Science department). The panel was organized and moderated by Kenan’s Lou Brown.
My own comments focused on:
- The large number of value-dimensions along which different consumers might want assurances about the things they buy.
- The epistemic problems involved in figuring out how to measure the things you might want to certify (e.g., measuring “environmental impact”).
- The moral problem that arises when 2 or more desirable characteristics conflict (e.g., “wild” vs “organic” salmon — you might want both, but no one fish can be both wild and organic.)
- The role of brands and certification schemes as “value-alignment” mechanisms, helping consumers find producers with whom they want to do business.
The panel was videorecorded, and the resulting 90-minute video is here, on YouTube: Certifying Virtue
Madoff, Accomplices, and Complicity
Filed under: accountability, excuses, finance, fraud, investing, white collar crime |
Comments (1) It takes two to tango. How many does it take to sustain a ponzi scheme?
See this tantalizing piece by Diana B. Henriques, for the NY Times: From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud
In many ways…Mr. Madoff seemed unchanged. He spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds, pointing to their “willful blindness” and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them.
“They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know….’”
Of course, as Henriques notes, “Mr. Madoff’s claims must be weighed against his tenuous credibility.”
But Madoff’s claims that others, including financial institutions and sophisticated investors, “had to know” something was wrong will ring true to anyone who knows the Enron story in detail. For a wonderful, if exhausting, tour through the Enron scandal, see Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. As McLean and Elkind make clear, Enron’s shenanigans only went on as long as they did because a lot of people, at a lot of financial institutions (and accounting firms and law firms) spent years and years with their eyebrows raised but kept their mouths shut.
Groupon Does the Right Thing
Filed under: accountability, advertising, decision-making, ethics, marketing, protest |
Leave a comment 
On Monday I blogged about the controversy over the Groupon.com ad that played during the Super Bowl, which made light of the plight of the people of Tibet. I suggested the ad was deeply disrespectful, and even played (perhaps unintentionally) on some unfortunate stereotypes. (See Groupon Super Bowl Ad: Unethical.)
Now it seems the company is taking the widespread criticism to heart, and pulling both the Tibet ad and the others in that series. Here’s the story, by Wailin Wong for the LA Times: Groupon pulls controversial ads
Groupon Inc. Chief Executive Andrew Mason said the Chicago-based daily deals provider is pulling all of the Super Bowl ads that had provoked a negative reaction online over the weekend.
“We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted,” Mason wrote in a blog post on Thursday, adding: “We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads….”
Now, Groupon (and in particular, CEO Mason) seem genuinely contrite; they appear not to have foreseen the public reaction to their ads. Some might speculate, cynically, that they were actually banking on the controversy and the free publicity it would bring, but I see no evidence of that. Well, better late than never I guess. But even better would be a corporate culture that empowered insiders to say, at some point during the planning & production process, “Hmm, is this really a good idea?”
Sustainability Rankings, the Global 100, and Greenwashing
Filed under: accountability, consultants, ethics, greenwashing, marketing, rankings, sustainability, transparency |
Comments (16) 
What’s so sustainable about the Global 100 “World’s Most Sustainable Companies”? Not much, as far as I can see.
The ranking was released just a few days ago, as reported here by Helen Coster for Forbes: Ranking The World’s Most Sustainable Companies
The term “sustainable”–like “green” and “all-natural” before it–conveys an abstract sense of do- gooding that many companies have been happy to adopt. Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based media company, applies hard metrics to the otherwise fuzzy term, and Saturday it released its seventh-annual list of the world’s most sustainable companies….
So, what does sustainability mean, here? Toby Heaps, Corporate Knights’ editor-in-chief, says one key is to ask this question: “how are companies squeezing more wealth from the resources that they use?” So far so good — I suspect that kind of efficiency measure has something to do with what most people take “sustainability” to mean. But next Heaps strays into strange territory when he asks, in addition, “How are they doing a better job of respecting the social contract, like paying taxes or having diverse leadership?” Huh? We’ll get back to the issue of criteria in a moment. First let’s look at the rankings.
The top end of the list is dominated by global brands from the telecommunication, pharmaceutical, and energy industries (Nokia, Johnson & Johnson and Intel are all in the top 5). But an oil company takes top honours (Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil). Yes, an oil company. Now, for many people, the petroleum industry is the epitome of unsustainable business. So this will immediately raise alarms for some people. Should it? Let’s take a closer look.
The Forbes story says that Statoil topped the list “thanks in part to improvements in its water productivity.” Fair enough: water productivity (efficiency of water use) is a clear sustainability issue. But what comes next is odd. The oil company apparently did well in the ranking in part because it is “also a healthy contributor to Norway’s coffers and has a diverse board”. In other words, this oil company scored well on a sustainability ranking by doing a whole bunch of stuff that has little to nothing to do with sustainability.
For still more detail, we can look at the ranking and an explanation of the methodology behind it on the Global 100 website. According to the Methodology page, the ranking is established by looking at “environmental, social, governance (ESG) and financial data.” Already we see here a rather expansive understanding of the word “sustainability.” Next, let’s look at specific measures they used.
Some of the metrics used make perfect sense, such as energy productivity and waste productivity. Some of them, however, are hard to figure, such as CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio. Executive compensation is an interesting (and, I think, complicated) ethical issue, but how does it relate to sustainability? The detailed explanation of the various criteria offers this rationale:
A disproportionate share of compensation expenditure going to one person can lead to lower overall workforce motivation, and can also be indicative of potential governance risks, or misalignments of interests.
All of that seems true, but largely irrelevant. Sure, those risks are real, and they may (may!) have something to do with keeping the company in business. But surely that is not what anyone beyond a handful of consultants means by the word “sustainability.” When the public wonders whether Walmart’s business is “sustainable,” they are certainly not wondering whether the company’s business practices are going to let them keep chugging along.
Another mystifying criterion is “Leadership Diversity: % of women board directors.” Again, that’s an important issue; companies need to do more to get women into senior leadership positions, including on the board. But is there really a clear link — either conceptual or empirical — between having women on the board and the company being sustainable? Unfortunately, while that criterion is mentioned on the Criteria & Weights page, it is missing entirely from the more detailed explanation of those criteria (see PDF document here) so what the link is supposed to be is anyone’s guess.
Other weird criteria include “Safety Productivity”, “% tax paid” and “Innovation Capacity,” though the latter makes at least a modicum of sense. As far as I can see, fully half of the ten criteria used have no clear link to sustainability. And given that all criteria are given equal weight in the Global 100 methodology, that means the ranking is actually only half about sustainability, and half about other stuff.
Now, I’ve been critical of the term “sustainability” before (see “Sustainability is Unustainable.”) A lot of what I’ve said before has to do with confusion over the meaning of the term, and the resulting difficulty in measuring and tracking companies’ performance in this area. I think the Global 100 ranking ends up providing a wonderful case in point.
But the real problem, here, is that the kind of sustainability measure instantiated by the Global 100 profits directly from the confusion over the meaning of the term “sustainability.” (And I do mean “profits” — Corporate Knights is a for-profit organization, as presumably are the research firms that helped develop the Global 100 and the vast majority of sustainability consultants who help companies preen for such rankings.) Now, I don’t actually have anything against profits, and I’m not impugning anyone’s intentions. My point is that the only reason this particular set of measures can be thought to add up to “sustainability” is that the term itself is ambiguous and means different things to different people.
What’s really being measured here is a broad range of indicators having to do with all kinds of things. Again, it includes “environmental, social, governance…and financial data.” And it’s all important stuff. So the Global 100 ranking really does tell us something important (but vague) about the companies listed. But what is announced is that ‘these companies are sustainable.’ What does that mean to the public? Environment. So the list implies that these companies are environmental good guys. The result: greenwash.
So, what’s the public to do? Maybe all the public can do is realize that what sustainability consultants and gurus mean by “sustainability” has relatively little to do with what they mean by that word.
MTV’s “Skins”: The Ethics of Profiting from Teen Sexuality
Filed under: accountability, advertising, children, CSR, employees, ethics, marketing, media, sex, stakeholders, values |
Comments (5) There’s been a lot of chatter in the last few days about MTV’s teensploitation show, “Skins.” Of course, one theory says that that’s just what MTV has been hoping for — a lot of free advertizing.
I’m quoted giving a business-ethics perspective on the show in this story, by the NYT’s David Carr: “A Naked Calculation Gone Bad.”
What if one day you went to work and there was a meeting to discuss whether the project you were working on crossed the line into child pornography? You’d probably think you had ended up in the wrong room.
And you’d be right.
Last week, my colleague Brian Stelter reported that on Tuesday, the day after the pilot episode of “Skins” was shown on MTV, executives at the cable channel were frantically meeting to discuss whether the salacious teenage drama starring actors as young as 15 might violate federal child pornography statutes.
Since I’m quoted in that story, I’ll just cut to my own conclusion:
“Even if you decide that this show is not out-and-out evil and that the show is legal from a technical perspective, that doesn’t really eliminate the significant social and ethical issues it raises,” said Chris MacDonald, a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto’s Clarkson Center for Business Ethics and author of the Business Ethics Blog. “Teenagers are both sexual beings and highly impressionable, and because of that, they’re vulnerable to just these kinds of messages. You have to wonder if there isn’t a better way to make a living.”
I wouldn’t bet one way or the other on how this will turn out — in particular on whether pressure from advocacy groups and advertisers will convince MTV to can the show. If it does, then this controversy turns into a nice example of how just the wrong kind of corporate culture can produce bad results. Consider: there are an awful lot of people involved in conceiving and producing, and airing a TV drama. In order for Skins to make it to air, a lot of people had to spend months and months going with the flow, basically saying to themselves and each other “Yes, it is a really good idea to show teens this way, to use teen actors this way, and to market this kind of show to teens.” Hundreds of people involved in the production must have either thought it was a good idea, or thought otherwise but decided they couldn’t speak up. If this turns out badly, MTV will have provided yet another example of how things can go badly when employees aren’t encouraged and empowered to speak up and to voice dissent.
The Business Ethics Blog 