Archive for the ‘corporations’ Category
Organizational Diversity in a Capitalist Society
Today is the 2nd day of a 2-day workshop I’m attending on Regulatory Design, hosted by Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. I posted yesterday about the difficulty of developing and implementing effective regulations.
Day 2 of the workshop begain with a discussion of a stimulating paper by sociologist Marc Schneiberg, called “Toward an Organizationally Diverse American Capitalism? Cooperative, Mutual, and Local, State-Owned Enterprise”. Marc’s paper is about alternatives to the shareholder-driven corporation that currently dominates industrialized economies. He basically argues that, in the wake of economic crisis, we should at least have a renewed discussion of alternative models of economic organization. To be clear, Marc isn’t suggesting alternatives to capitalism, but rather promoting the idea of experimenting (further) with different ways of organizing business within a capitalist framework. In most jurisdictions, business law makes available plenty of non-corporate options for organizing business. But shareholder-driven firms dominate. So there are interesting empirical and normative questions about the balance between various forms.
Here are some interesting questions to ponder, with regard to this issue in general:
- Why do cooperatives of various kinds, and other non-shareholder-driven businesses, seem to thrive in some industries but not in others?
- If in fact shareholder-driven corporations are particularly conducive to instability and crisis, how common do alternative forms need to be in order to have an appreciable effect on the stability of the economy as a whole?
- From a public-policy point of view, what can (or should) governments do to encourage alternative business forms? (Note that in some places, alternative forms already receive, for example, favourable tax treatment.)
- Which particular problems (of governance or of ethics) are solved by non-corporate ways of organizing business?
- What are the costs (socially and individually) of various forms of organization?
- The profit motive (taken as driving shareholder-controlled corporations) is often singled out for criticism. But all organizations are, by definition, driven by some combination of motives. To what extent, and under what circumstances, are those motives more, or less, likely to encourage anti-social behaviour?
Essential reading for those interested in the empirical side of this topic is a book I’ve recommended here before, and which Marc cites in his paper, namely The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann. It’s a dense scholarly book, written by a prominent scholar of corporate law. But for anyone with a serious interest in these topics, it’s well worth the effort. Hansmann’s basic argument (derived from an examination of various case-studies as well as international patterns) is that ownership patterns are best explained by things like a) homogeneity of interests among a group of stakeholders (whether they be shareholders or customers or employees or whatever) and b) the extent to which that group of stakeholders find it reasonably easy to monitor the behaviour of the organization’s managers. In other words, for any organization, some stakeholders want (and are willing to bargain for) control, whereas other stakeholders merely want (and are only willing to “pay” for) a thinner kind of interaction with the organization. The implication is that, if Hansmann is right, any thought that there could be a “better” or even “best” mix of organizational structures, from a social point of view, is going to run up against the fact that the actual mixture is being driven by the desires and capacities of millions of individual market participants, and changing the mix will require changing some of those desires, some of those capacities, or both.
Honesty, Reputation, and Ethics
Filed under: character, corporations, ethics, honesty, regulations, transparency, trust, values |
Comments (6) The connection between reputation and ethics is complex. A pattern of ethical behaviour is clearly essential to establishing a good reputation, which for a company means a reputation as the kind of company people want to do business with. But hold on. All that’s really essential, from a business point of view, is to be perceived as ethical. But there are two ways of reading that ancient point. The cynical way is to say that all that matters in business is to give people the impression that you’re ethical, and that can be done through good PR or even outright misrepresentation. The less cynical way of reading that is that you’ve got not just to be ethical, in the sense of doing what you think is the right thing to do; you’ve also got to convince key stakeholders that you’ve done the right thing.
Take honesty, for example. Honesty matters, but so do public perceptions of honesty. In that regard, see this useful piece on corporate disclosure, by Steven M Davidoff for the NY Times: In Corporate Disclosure, a Murky Definition of Material.
Most of the piece is an exploration of the legal standard of “materiality.” Materiality is essentially about relevance. Publicly-traded companies are obligated to reveal certain information to the investing public (typically through filings with the relevant regulatory agency). But not everything they do needs to be reported — not everything is sufficiently important — and there are lots of legitimate reasons why companies don’t want to reveal any- and everything. Figuring out just what needs to be disclosed is a difficult legal problem. But towards the end of the piece, Davidoff argues that companies should avoid focusing on mere legalities. As Davidoff points out:
Companies need to understand that information disclosure is not just a legal game. Failure to disclose important information on a timely basis can harm a company’s reputation.
So, it’s all about reputation, about ‘optics’? “What about ethics?” you ask. But consider: why would a failure of disclosure harm a company’s reputation? In part, it would do so because (or if) the failure harms people’s interests. But even then, harming someone’s interests won’t immediately harm reputation. If, for example, Ford designs a new SUV that’s so good that sales of GM’s SUV’s fall, putting thousands of GM employees out of work, well, that’s bad for GM’s employees, but the harm done to them by Ford is not going to damage Ford’s reputation. Because, after all, the harm done to the employees was the result of fair competitive practices on the part of Ford. A company’s behaviour is only going to hurt its reputation if some critical mass of people see that behaviour as unethical. So in the end, even a concern about “mere reputation” has to be grounded in ethical principles.
Who Else is Too Big to Fail?
Filed under: banking, complexity, corporations, disaster, economics, finance, government, risk, sustainability |
Comments (13) The notion that some companies are “too big to fail” — too large and too interconnected with the rest of the economy for their failure to be permitted by government — is lamentably familiar to most of us in the wake of the 2007-2010 financial crisis. The term has most famously been applied to the biggest American banks (e.g., Bank of America) and insurance companies (e.g., AIG), and it motivated the multi-multi-billion-dollar government bailouts of 2008/2009. In some ways, it’s a radical notion: for most of modern economic history, the assumption has been that the economy could operate according to something like survival of the fittest. If a company is so mismanaged that it fails, so be it. That’s life in a competitive market. Of course, governments have from time to time propped up companies seen as particularly important employers, but such moves are always divisive. There has seldom been such widespread agreement that certain companies really are so big, and so important, that they cannot be allowed to fail.
But outside of the financial industry, what companies might reasonably be thought of as “too big to fail?” Are there companies the failure of which would be truly catastrophic? What companies are there such that, if they suddenly ceased operations, the result would be disastrous not just for individual customers, employees, and shareholders, but for society as a whole?
I’ll mention a few possibilities, and then open the floor for discussion:
BP, Chevron, and the other very large oil companies. As unpopular as they are, it’s hard to deny that their product is utterly essential, at least for the time being. Any one of the biggest companies going out of business would, I suspect, have a terrible impact on the reliability of supplies of gasoline and heating fuel, and would most certainly result in increased prices. On the other hand, most of the world’s oil supply flows through the big state-owned oil companies of the middle east, rather than through private companies like Exxon and Shell the others, the ones that come most readily to mind for North American and European consumers.
Big pharma. Again, not a popular industry. And much of what they produce — treatments for baldness, erectile dysfunction, etc. — is far from essential. But some of their more important products, including things like antibiotics and vaccines, truly are essential and an interruption in their supply could have catastrophic consequences, from a public health point of view. But then, that industry has enough players in it, with overlapping product lines, that it’s unlikely the collapse of any one company would have a huge impact. But really, I’m guessing here. Perhaps the collapse of the maker of whatever the single most antibiotic is would be catastrophic. (Does anyone know?)
What about UPS? That one may surprise you, but the company handles something over 5 million packages per day, which I’ve heard adds up to a non-trivial percentage of American GDP. If UPS disappeared tomorrow, of course, Fedex and the USPS would take up some of the slack, but the short-term effect on American business (and hence consumers) would be significant.
Locally, surely, there are lots of companies that might be considered essential. Companies involved in ensuring the quality of municipal water supplies might count (including the ones that provide the chemicals needed for water purification). And in places where fire departments are privately-run, those would obviously count. But really, I’m looking for examples of companies the failure or disappearance of which would have widespread effects from a social point of view.
Of course, the phrase “too big to fail” isn’t just descriptive. In the world of finance, it is seem as having immediate policy implications. In 2009, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve (and no fan of government intervention in the economy), said “If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big.” Are there companies outside of finance where such an argument could be made?
Ethics of Profit, Part 3: The Profit Motive
Filed under: character, competition, corporations, decision-making, ethics, finance, profits, white collar crime |
Comments (7) 
This is the third in a 3-part series on the ethics of profit. (See also Part 1 and Part 2.) As mentioned in previous postings, we should distinguish between our ethical evaluation of profit per se (which, after all, just means financial “gain”), and our ethical evaluation of the profit motive. After all, I don’t worry at all that Big Pharma makes big profits — that just means that they make products that lots of people think are worth paying for — but I do have serious worries about what people inside the pharmaceutical industry are willing to do to maintain those profits.
But we should be cautious about jumping too quickly to criticize the profit motive, either in particular cases or as a force in the economy as a whole. Here are just a few points:
1) People often suspect the profit motive — or at least, excessive focus on the profit motive, in the form of greed — of being responsible for a lot of corporate wrong-doing. But, anecdotes aside, that intuitive hypothesis isn’t necessarily well-supported by the facts. I’ve mentioned previously a paper by philosopher Joseph Heath* that points out that there are problems with the theory that greed is the root cause of a lot of wrongdoing. Corporate crime is actually more often aimed at loss-avoidance than at profit-making. And it’s also worth noting that we see lots of white-collar crime occurring at the top of organizations, committed by people who are already rich and who hence have relatively little to gain in financial terms. As Joe points out, the criminological literature has long since discarded the notion that greed is the root of all (or even most) evil.
2) Despite the fact that the traditional corporate (and anti-corporate) rhetoric has focused on the significance of profits, it’s probably much more likely that corporations and the key decision-makers within them are moved by a much broader range of motives, including things like:
- A desire to increase market share;
- The desire to innovate;
- The desire to create cool products;
- Basic competitive drives to be (and prove yourself to be) bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, etc.;
- The CEO’s desire to build his or her personal legacy;
- etc.
Of course, each of those motives can almost certainly result in wrongdoing too. But that just reinforces the point that even if the profit motive causes trouble, it isn’t unique in that regard.
3) The profit motive, whatever else it may do, plays 2 absolutely essential roles in any modern economy. Economist Steven Horwitz points this out in his “Profit: Not Just a Motive”. One role (as Adam Smith pointed out) is the basic one of motivating productive activity. Now, Smith never said that the profit motive is the only thing that motivates people to engage in production and trade. But what he did say is that even someone who doesn’t happen to have much love for his or her fellow human being is liable to end up doing something productive, even if only because he or she wants to earn a living. The other role for the profit motive is more subtle, and has to do with information. As Horowitz puts it:
What critics of the profit motive almost never ask is how, in the absence of prices, profits, and other market institutions, producers will be able to know what to produce and how to produce it. The profit motive is a crucial part of a broader system that enables producers and consumers to share knowledge in ways that other systems do not.
4) The profit motive also plays an essential role in modern corporate governance. Most large corporations are “owned” (in a very loose sense) by shareholders, to whom corporate managers and directors owe a fiduciary duty. In particular, managers and directors are obligated to try to make a profit. (Note that, contrary to what many seem to think, there is no obligation to actually make a profit, and the need to make a profit is not, in fact, legally binding or overriding. Shareholders only ever get a profit after a number of other, legally-binding, obligations — such as the obligation to pay workers, to pay suppliers, to provide refunds for consumers who bought faulty products, etc. — are met.) The strong obligation to try to make a profit for shareholders provides focus for managers. Rather than being pulled in 20 different directions by 20 different stakeholders, corporate managers have in mind that, yes, they need to keep in mind various stakeholder obligations, but all of that has to be part of an overall plan aimed at shareholder profits. Many people believe that this imposes a kind of discipline on corporate executives, without which those executives would be free to feather their own beds, throw lavish parties for their favourite charities (not necessarily the most needy ones), hire under-qualified siblings for key roles, etc.
5) Getting rid of the profit motive would essentially mean abolishing private ownership. When we talk about “profit”, we’re typically talking about the money that flows from owning something. It might be the landlord’s profit (i.e., whatever’s left after costs are subtracted from rent) or the shareholder’s profit (i.e., the dividend that might be paid out on the shares he or she owns, if the corporation happens to make a profit). Abolishing the profit motive basically means and end to permitting individuals to own things. So why do critics of the profit motive so seldom (in the last, say, 4 decades) propose ending private ownership? Hmmm. As Joseph Heath put it in “Learning to love the Psychopath” [PDF] (a review of the movie, The Corporation), “If public ownership is not the solution, then private ownership cannot be the problem.”
6) Even if we could keep our attachment to private ownership and wish into existence more “positive” motives than the profit motive, it’s not clear that we would be better off. Even if large numbers of executives (and shareholders) could be convinced not to aim at profit, but instead to aim at things like charitable deeds or the public good or world peace, it’s not clear that that would solve the problems we are most worried about. Does anyone really think that fraud couldn’t be, or indeed hasn’t been, committed in the name of charity? Does anyone believe that lies haven’t been told and thefts committed in the name of the public good?
None of this is intended as a blanket endorsement of profit-seeking. It’s just a reminder that in our haste to criticize the profit motive, we ought not ignore important questions about just what role the profit motive plays, what current institutions do to transform a range of motives into a range of outcomes, and what alternative motives and institutions are available to us.
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*Joseph Heath, “Business Ethics & Moral Motivation: a Criminological Perspective,” Journal of Business Ethics 83:4, 2008. Here’s the abstract.
Ethics of Profit, Part 1: Excessive Profits
Filed under: consumers, corporations, definitions, economics, ethics, finance, pricing, profits, trade |
Comments (5) 
This is the first of a 3-part series on the ethics of profit.
Is making a profit ethically good, or bad, or neutral? Or, better still, are there situations in which making a profit is either good, or bad, or neutral?
Profit is often the subject of criticism. The film, “The Corporation”, has as its main target not corporations per se, but the profit motive in particular. Michael Moore appears in the film, saying that while some corporations do good things, “The problem comes in, in the profit motivation here, because these people, there’s no such thing as enough.”
Now, the idea of profit is often tied up with money, with ‘filthy lucre.’ After all, everyone knows that saying about money being the root of all evil. But in the abstract, profit needn’t be defined in terms of cash. In the abstract, profit is just the “cooperative surplus” that results from a mutually-beneficial exchange. When I buy an apple (for, let’s say, $1) at my local market, both the owner of the market and I end up better off. We both “profit.” My own “profit” is the amount by which I value the apple over the $1 that I paid for it. And the market owner’s profit is the amount by which the sale price of $1 exceeds her own costs (apple + labour + overhead, etc.). And the fact that we both profit from the exchange is precisely what makes the exchange good for both of us.
Now, I think we need to distinguish between our ethical evaluation of profit, and our ethical evaluation of the profit motive. Because even if we agree that profit is generally OK, we can still worry about the things that people (or companies) will do in the pursuit of profit.
I’ll focus another day on the profit motive. Today I want to focus on profit itself. It seems to me that there are 2 kinds of circumstances in which profit itself is subjected (rightly or wrongly) to ethical criticism. One is when profits are excessively large; the other is when profit is gained unjustly. Today I’ll focus solely on the idea of excessive profit.
Several industries are commonly singled out as having unjustly large profits. One is the banking industry. Another is the pharmaceutical industry. Likewise, if we expand the category of “profit” to include individual profit in the form of salaries, then Wall Street is regularly singled out as a place where excessive profits are to be had. The fundamental ethical question with regard to large profits is what philosophers would call a question of “distributive justice.” Basically, is it fair that some people have so much money, while others in the world have so little?
A few points are worth making about big profits:
1) It’s worth remembering that very large corporate profits don’t necessarily translate into large amounts of personal wealth for anybody. Consider the fact that a company that has several billion dollars in profits — a lot of money, by anyone’s accounting — might have hundreds of millions of shares outstanding, spread across thousands (or even millions) of shareholders, and might pay out only a tiny dividend (say, a dollar per share). So a massive profit doesn’t necessarily translate into massive personal wealth for anyone.
2) Although many of us have intuitions that say that large disparities in wealth are unjust, it has proven incredibly difficult to translate those intuitions into anything like a coherent ethical theory. Despite our best efforts, we simply have no sound explanation of a) why it is that differences in wealth (fairly acquired) ought to be considered unfair, or b) just how large a difference has to be in order to be considered unfair. The lack of such a theory doesn’t negate our intuitions, but it should give us pause before we assert that particular disparities are “obviously” or “grossly” unethical.
3) It’s worth noting that what I referred to above as our “intuition” about injustice might also be referred to as a form of envy. And envy is far from admirable. As philosopher Anthony Flew once pointed out*, “this envy which resents that others too should gain, and maybe gain more than us, must be accounted much nastier than any supposed ‘intrinsic selfishness’ of straight self-interest.”
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*Anthony Flew, “The Profit Motive,” Ethics, Vol. 86, No. 4 (Jul., 1976), pp. 312-322
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Update: Part 2 of this series is here and Part 3 is here.
Corporate Motives and Discrimination
Filed under: corporations, culture, decision-making, discrimination, employees, management, values |
Comments (1) Motives, especially corporate ones, are hard to figure. Some people, of course, are skeptical about the notion that an abstract entity like a corporation can have motives (or intentions or beliefs of attitudes or any of those sorts of things), even though we all have a tendency to talk about corporations as if they are capable of having them. It’s pretty common to talk about a company “expecting” profits to rise next year, or “wanting” to increase its market share, and so on. But even if we’re not so skeptical about attributing motives (etc.) to companies, their motives can be pretty elusive. We may not be ready to believe corporate spokespersons when they tell us what their company’s motives are, and besides, even if everyone within a company agrees that a certain course of action is the right one to take, it’s entirely possible that different parties within the company all have different motives for doing so.
But sometimes it’s good to at least try to understand what motivates companies, particularly when we want to diagnose a widespread and/or persistent problem, in order to suggest changes.
This question of determining motives came to mind when I read a story about an age discrimination case at 3M: “3M settles age-discrimination suit for up to $12M”.
3M Co. has agreed to pay up to $12 million to settle an age-discrimination lawsuit with as many as 7,000 current and former employees.
The 2004 lawsuit targeted the company’s performance-review system, alleging that older workers were disproportionately downgraded. It also accused the company of favoring younger employees for certain training opportunities that could fast-track them for promotions….
If we accept for the sake of argument that some sort of systemic discrimination took place at 3M, what on earth might have motivated such behaviour?
Here are a few possibilities:
- Profits. Maybe the discriminatory practices and policies were an attempt to increase efficiency in order to boost profits. This of course is the go-to assumption for most corporate critics.
- Energy. Maybe those who engaged in age discrimination weren’t thinking specifically about the end goal of profits, but merely had a certain vision in mind of the kind of company they ought to have, and the kind of youthful energy that makes a company vibrant.
- Recruitment. Maybe 3M wanted to give younger employees lots of opportunities so that they could brag about opportunities for young employees when recruiting new talent. Most recruits, after all, are likely to be young, and ambitious young people are likely to be drawn to a company that holds the promise of great opportunities.
- Bias. It could be that various key decision-makers inside 3M were simply personally biased, as many (most? all?) of us are, against older employees.
- Justice It’s at least possible that key decision-makers within 3M actually thought that giving preferential treatment to younger employees was the morally-right thing to do. Quick, ask yourself this: if 2 patients each need a heart transplant, and you’ve got just one donor heart, and one patient is 15 and the other is 55, who would you give the heart to? Surely all of us are tempted, from time to time, to think that the young are particularly deserving of opportunities. Note that I’m not defending such a view, here.
What do you think? Note that the point here is not about the 3M case, but about what could motivate a company, any company, to engage in discriminatory behaviour. And again, I think it’s worth contemplating the possibility that there simply was no corporate motive (nor maybe even a truly corporate “cause”).
The Importance of “Tone at the Middle”
Filed under: corporations, culture, employees, ethics, governance, leadership |
Comments (2) 
In yesterday’s blog entry, I mentioned that I was attending the Global Ethics Summit in New York. I was there in part because I had been asked to moderate a panel, the topic of which was “Tone from the Middle: Who, Why and How?” It’s a great topic. I’ve long said that there are two competing truisms with regard to creating an ethical culture within any company. One has to do with leadership, and the idea that ethics has to come from the very top of an organization. The other truism has to do with buy-in, and the fact that ethics cannot be imposed from the top down — you have to get buy-in from the folks on the front lines. But too seldom do we talk about the crucial middle layer, the layer of managers that takes orders, and other more subtle signals, from the C-suite, and passes them along. And whether they pass along a clear, urgent signal about ethics or a distorted or weak signal is a huge variable. That middle layer is a crucial conduit, but it is also a crucial source of ethical momentum if and when leadership from the top is lacking.
It’s worth noting that the audience at this event consisted mostly of corporate lawyers working in ethics-and-compliance. The questions I posed to the panel were designed with that audience in mind, but hopefully they are of broader interest. Here are a few of the questions I posed. I welcome your own answers and suggestions in the Comments section.
- Many companies, especially large ones, use web-based tools as an efficient means of conducting ethics training. But such tools may not be ideal for conveying and ensuring the right “tone,” which seems to be something intangible. What concrete steps can a company with thousands of employees take to reach that crucial “middle” layer of the company and make sure that the tone there is right?
- Why have so many firms struggled to reach the “middle”? Is it a lack of appreciation of the importance of the middle? A lack of understanding of how to influence that middle layer, or something else?
- Assuming we can figure out how to influence the “tone at the middle,” the further challenge is to figure out what that tone should be. The short answer, of course, is “an ethical tone.” But what does that mean, more specifically, in practice? What kind of tone should we be looking to establish?
- Having the right “tone at the middle” arguably involves two challenges: one is avoiding a negative tone — a culture of fear, a culture that is afraid to talk about ethics — and the other is promoting a positive tone — a culture in which ethics is talked about openly. Those are perhaps 2 sides of the same coin, and maybe the one has to be avoided before the other can be promoted. Which part of that is likely to be more challenging?
- One of the problems with relying on tone at the top is that the top can be pretty unstable. The average tenure of a CEO these days is something like 3 or 4 years. Is the relative stability at the middle of an organization part of what makes the tone at the middle so important?
- In my own blogging, teaching, and consulting, I sometimes meet resistance to the use of the word “ethics” (as opposed to “corporate citizenship” or “CSR” or “integrity,” for example) because for some people the word “ethics” immediately makes people think of wrongdoing. Is finding the right language to talk about “doing the right thing” a challenge?
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.
Utility Monopolies: Who Pays for Mistakes?
Filed under: consumers, corporations, energy, ethics, excuses, government, pricing, profits, shareholders, stakeholders |
Comments (3) Naturally, when any organization suffers unanticipated expenses, it’s going to have to find ways to make up the shortfall in its budget. That’s exactly what happened to Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the provincially-owned power company responsible for generating about 70% of all the power consumed in the Canadian province of Ontario. A legal battle with customers ended up costing the company nearly $20 million. So, where did the company turn to recoup that amount? Well, to its customers, of course.
Here’s the story, via the CBC: Ont. electricity rates expected to rise next week
Electricity ratepayers in Ontario, already reeling from soaring prices, should brace for more increases.
The Ontario Energy Board agreed Tuesday to let utilities raise rates to recover $18 million they paid in fines and legal costs after charging consumers excessive interest on late payments….
Now most companies could only dream of passing along such costs to their customers. Some might even succeed. But most wouldn’t. Most would be hindered by the fact that, if they raise the prices they charge to customers, customers would simply buy from someone else. But electricity in Ontario (as in most places) is a monopoly: an organization called Hydro One has a monopoly on distribution of electricity throughout Ontario, and the power it distributes is produced by a small handful of organizations, the most significant of which by far is OPG. So, with the consent of the Ontario Energy Board (the relevant regulatory agency) all OPG has to do is raise its prices, and the company’s customers end up paying for the consequences of its legal tussle with…the company’s customers.
I don’t know much about the original lawsuit, but I do know that this was a predictable result of it. And that puts customers of utilities in a strange position. Sure, customers can sue the a utility when they screw up, but all the utility is going to do is turn around and raise your rates to get the money back out of you.
Now, just to be clear, I generally have nothing against this sort of monopoly. Electricity distribution is what economists call a “natural monopoly.” It’s crazy to have multiple competing sets of power lines running down to street. And, for that matter, it might well be crazy to let many multiple competing companies all run nuclear power plants (OPG runs several of those). But at any rate, it’s worth recognizing the effect that this monopoly (or quasi-monopoly) situation has in the event that the company screws up (say, by overcharging customers). The expenses incurred are entirely likely simply to be passed along to their captive customers.
By the way, Ontario Power Generation (whose only shareholder is the government of Ontario) had a profit of $333 million for the 4th quarter of 2010.
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Thanks to NW for the story.
Russian Business Ethics
Filed under: accountability, corporations, economics, ethics, international, transparency, trust |
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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?”)
The Business Ethics Blog 