business

Ethics Hero (sort of, maybe, a bit): Google

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Google is a little like the turncoat in an action movie who almost sinks the hero but then makes a surprise return at the climax to save the day. In 2006, many of us were disgusted when Google agreed to help the oppressive Chinese government censor speech and information in exchange for getting a crack at the biggest market on the planet. We heard the company’s rationalizations about compromising their principles now to help open up Chinese society, but the truth always was that “Do no evil” Google was willing  to do evil for four years in exchange for a lot of yen.  At last the company finally decided that it couldn’t look at itself in its virtual mirror anymore, abandoned its agreement to help China control what its people could read and say, and moved its server to Hong Kong.

Google has garnered a lot of praise on-line and elsewhere for its decision. The company did the right thing, it is true, but it would have been far more admirable if it had taken the same position four years earlier, and refused to play the part of China’s cyber-muzzle in its quest for big bucks.

That feckless guy in the action movie who comes back in the last reel isn’t really a hero, you know. The only reason he is in a position to act like one is that he did the wrong thing in the first place. We’re glad he had a change of heart, sure. But let’s not get carried away.

__________________

Update: In the category of getting “carried away,” here is a stunning example from “Op-Ed News”:

“…again Google has found itself in a situation where its ethics are being challenged by one of the most oppressive governments (In our opinion) in the Global Community, and rather than backing down, Google has chosen to stand-up for their belief that moral values and ethics trump corporate profit, an occurrence so rare these days that we believe Google  deserves special recognition for refusing to compromise their core ethics of “Don’t be Evil,” even in a situation where it could result in the loss of huge profits in China’s booming economy and what may one day be one of the largest Internet markets in the world…”

The author, William Cormier, conveniently ignores the fact that Google’s decision that “moral values and ethics trump corporate profit” has only come after four years of letting profit trump its values. What does he think Google has been doing the last four years? Does he really believe China just started  censoring Google searches? You can read his entire, hilarious hosanna to Google here.

Black Barbie, Walmart, and Pricing Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Social commentators, business analysts and ethicists are tying themselves into logical and philosophical knots trying to explain exactly what is so wrong in 2010 with Walmart cutting the price of its black Barbie doll, which has not been selling well at its current price, while leaving the price of its white Barbie, which has been selling, almost twice as high. Continue reading →

Everyday Ethics: The Dilemma of the Tardy Warning

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Not for the first time in my life, the Dilemma of the Tardy Warning is causing me sleepless nights.

By random chance I encountered a gentleman who worked in my field, and we had a phone conversation. He was pleasant and flattering; his projects sounded both interesting and like possible complements to my own. We exchanged e-mails, and he sent me some materials. I said that I would contact him to set up a face-to-face meeting, and meant it.

Then I casually mentioned him to some colleagues, who reacted as if I had announced a planned liaison with the Marquis de Sade. Continue reading →

If Only There Had Been More Like Her…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Frank Navran, a friend, colleague and perceptive ethicist with a talent for teaching ethics with vivid stories, tells this one, a true case of integrity applied the right way, by the critical person, in a timely fashion:

While attending an ethics conference in New York in October of 2008, I decided to stay with friends in New Jersey. That meant riding the train into the City for my conference. On the second day of the conference, I happened to sit next to a young woman who was neither reading nor napping so I engage her in conversation. It started with a simple “Do you ride the train every day?”

She said that yes. she does ride the train every day, and had been doing so for seven years since she and her family chose to move to New Jersey “for the kids”. I asked what kind of work she did, and she replied that she  was the CFO of a mid-sized insurance company.  Now, recalling that this was the fall of 2008, insurance companies were in the news. And so I asked her how things were at her company. Her reply was, “Better than most”.

Now I was curious. “What does “Better than most” mean?”, I asked.

She went on to explain. “About three years ago I left AIG, where I knew my prospects for advancement were limited, and accepted an offer to become the CFO for my current company.  As a newly-hired CFO, one of the first things I did was to meet with my staff. When meeting with the gentleman who managed our investment portfolio I asked for a description of our holdings. He proceeded to sing the praises of our investment strategy which included a significant percentage dedicated to what he referred to as “securitized debt”.

She said she was not familiar with these instruments and asked how they worked. His reply was that they were AAA rated and were returning huge investments. Unsatisfied, she probed for details, and when he was unable to provide them, suggested that the “do his homework” and meet with her again in two days.

Two days later, when asked to explain securitized debt, he restated that they were AAA rated and very profitable but added that no one seemed to really understand just how they worked.

Her reply, she told me, was simple She gave him three months to divest the company of anything that he couldn’t adequately explain to her simply because she was not going to go before her Board and justify their investment strategy without understanding the nature of and workings of the instruments in which they were invested.

“In other words, she had integrity,” Frank concludes. “What a radical concept.”

Indeed. What the CFO did was not, of course, radical. It was honest, responsible and prudent. We can only imagine how different things would be today if there had been more executives like her when the financial sector was operating with mirrors,  winks, and sleight of hand.

<Sigh!>

October Unethical Website: www.chamber-of-commerce.us.

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Today the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of the designated enemies of the Obama administration. This is not a complete surprise. The Chamber, organized at the request of President Taft specifically to communicate the positions and interests of the private sector in contrast to those of organized labor (the AFL-CIO’s offices are virtually next door to the Chamber, which itself looks across Lafayette Park onto the White House) always has a better relationship with Republican administrations than Democrat, because of the two parties’ very different philosophies on labor, regulation, free enterprise, taxation, and other epic issues. Other Democratic administrations have managed to respond to the Chamber’s predictable opposition without vilifying it; but not this one. Taking its cue from the White House’s regrettable enemies-list approach, a coalition of extreme progressive-left organizations have launched  www.StopTheChamber.com to make the vilification intense, focusing on de-legitimizing the Chamber as a national policy advocate.

Typical of such groups and such efforts (by both the Left and the Right), StoptheChamber’s screed  begins with the assumption that its position is the only defensible one, that they have all the answers, that they are good, and therefore the opposition is evil. The Chamber, in this formula, is not trying to avoid untenable deficits and large tax increases, as it claims, but rather working to deny health care for all. It is not questioning the wisdom of spending billions of dollars and handicapping U.S. industry with scientifically dubious solutions to climate change, but rather trying to poison the environment for profit. It is not lobbying, but “buying Congress.” [Clarification: I agree that a lot of lobbying, including that of the Chamber and its members, does amount to “buying Congress,” or trying to. Lobbying, as it is currently practiced in America, too often promotes corruption. It is disingenuous, however, to take the position that one side’s lobbying is corrupt while the other side’s identical activities are virtuous.]

The group’s remedy for the inconvenience of the Chamber’s opposition is typically undemocratic: shut it down with investigations and government harassment. Alleging “criminal activity and fraud” (and, amusingly, quoting disgraced felon Eliott Spitzer, the deposed Governor of New York, to bolster its claims), the group wants to stop the Chamber from lobbying and expressing contrary opinions…essentially because it is a formidable adversary.

OK. The group’s rhetoric (the coalition is called “the Velvet Revolution,” and finding the actual groups it includes is extremely time-consuming—at least the Chamber’s members don’t hide behind their umbrella) is undemocratic, uncivil, hyperbolic, and juvenile, but typical (sadly) of a lot of over-heated ranting on the Right and the Left, and individually harmless. (The cumulative effect of this sort of political offal-throwing on all sides is disastrous to our government, but that is a larger topic for another post.) It announces itself for what it is, an unapologetic, extreme, progressive, take-no-prisoners organization advocating revolutionary change in America. if you didn’t already agree with their assertions, you will not find them especially persuasive. When the group dashed far past the ethical line was when it held a fake press conference under the Chamber’s banner, and supported it with the fake website, http://www.chamber-of-commerce.us The address is misleading, and the site itself is more so. Using graphics indistinguishable from the actual Chamber homepage, the site makes a serious effort to deceive any reader into believing he or she has reached the US Chamber website, and that the Chamber, through a statement by its President, Tom Donohue, is reversing course and embracing climate change legislation.

A hoax, a joke, a parody—this is what the Velvet Revolution is calling the site, which is now, appropriately, the object of legal action by the Chamber. The Chamber has a right to express views contrary to climate change advocates, just as the Velvet Revolution has a right to make its opinions known; the press conference and the website interfere with the Chamber’s message. These cyber stunts may be legal (though I doubt it), but they are not in any sense fair or ethical. They are not designed to educate or inform, or even debate. Their purpose is to confuse, deceive, and annoy, while achieving media publicity as a bonus.

Of course, the Chamber’s choice was to protect itself from misrepresentation and help unsuspecting members of the public from landing on the wrong website, looking like bullies in the process, or to ignore the deception and allow it to continue. It is in a no-win situation, which is exactly as the Velvet Revolution intended. In other words, their tactic was an unqualified success.

That does not make it right.

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[Full disclosure: I used to work for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I was hired to run the Chamber’s policy issue research foundation, which had the assignment of performing open-ended, independent research on issues of concern to the nation and the business community. I was permitted to choose the topics of the research, to choose the researchers, and to pick each project’s advisory committees, which always included representatives from academia, labor, government and other points of view as well as private sector experts. Sometimes the results of our studies supported the Chamber’s position, and sometimes they did not. But I was never pressured to slant the findings; indeed, my boss at the Chamber, an Executive Vice-President, insisted that it was critical not to bias the studies in any way. He insisted on honesty, integrity, and letting the facts show the way, even when others in the Chamber leadership strongly objected.

That boss was Thomas J. Donohue, today the Chamber’s President. He was the most impressive of many impressive and able people I met in the seven years I worked for the Chamber, which was and is far less monolithic in its ideological views than its image suggests. Tom is smart, open-minded, a deft politician and a talented leader. He has a sense of humor. Most of all, I found him to be someone you can trust. He may defeat you, he may outmaneuver you, but he does not cheat, and I never knew him to lie. He has a constituency as president of a business organization, and he will fight for their interests, but not in an unfair way.

I left the Chamber shortly after Tom Donohue did (he became the head of the American Trucking Association), because he was no longer there to make sure my research efforts would have integrity and free reign. Still, I respected the organization, its expertise, breadth and professionalism. Many of its positions were not my positions, and are not today, but the Chamber does its job, agree with it or not, professionally and well.]

The Bank of America Teller and the Thumbless Customer

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

You may have heard the story: a branch of the Bank of America in Tampa refused to cash a check for Hillsborough County public works employee Steve Valdez, because the bank required a thumbprint from non-account holders, and Valdez has no arms. No arms, no hands; no hands, no thumbs; no thumbs, no prints; no prints, no cash.

“Sorry sir; it’s bank policy!”

The various news accounts of this classic tale of bureaucratic idiocy concentrated on the fact that the bank was violating the American with Disabilities Act. Voila! This is how law obscures ethics. Would the bank’s actions have been any more reasonable, fair, caring, kind and responsible if there was no law? Why should anyone with a brain, a heart and a sense of humanity require a law to look at a man with no arms and decide, “Gee, I guess the thumbprint requirement doesn’t apply in this case.”  This isn’t a legal matter. It’s an ethics question, and a really easy one, because the Golden Rule was invented for situations like this. If you were in the place of the thumbless man, Mr. Teller, what would you want someone in your position to do?This isn’t a legal matter. It’s an ethics question, and a really easy one, because the Golden Rule was invented for situations like this. If you were in the place of the thumbless man, Mr. Teller, what would you want someone in your position to do?

Nobody’s suggesting that the Bank of America should have suspended its policy out of pity or sympathy. This isn’t a bleeding heart argument: “Oh, the poor guy: he can’t hitch-hike or signal to a gladiator that he wants him to kill his opponent. I’ll cash his check to be a nice guy.” It has nothing to do with being nice. It has to do with recognizing when a policy is absurd in application, unjustly causing inconvenience and humiliation to another human being. Consider these dilemmas:

  • An attendant at a movie theater allows a patron to leave briefly to deal with an emergency. He returns to get back into the movie theater and join his family, but has somehow misplaced his ticket.  Should the attendant, who recognizes him, refuse to let him enter?
  • A driver enters a parking garage, then has to leave a few seconds later because of a medical problem. Should the parking attendant insist that he still pay the full-day minimum fee? (This one got an attendant shot by Steve Buscemi in “Fargo,” you’ll recall.)
  • A woman, obviously ill, staggers into a restaurant and begs to use the rest room. The establishment has a “patrons only” policy for its use. Should it refuse her?A student finds a knife in the hallway of a school, and immediately hands it over to the teacher. The school has a strict “no tolerance” policy on weapons, and the student is technically in possession of the knife: policy dictated that he not touch it, but alert an administrator. The teacher is certain that the student did not own the knife. Should the student be punished?
  • An adult dwarf on the Olympic riding team wants to buy a ticket on the carnival horse back ride to be with his child, but he doesn’t come up to the height mark on the sign designed to screen out young children. Should the operator tell him he can’t ride?

Answers to the above: “No way,” “Certainly not,” “Never”, “No,” and “Don’t be silly!”

Policies can’t be perfect. Human beings have an ethical obligation not to stick to them when they result in outrageous consequences to others, and there is no counterbalancing benefit to be gained by doing so, other than not varying from the policy.The teller should have asked for sufficient identification to satisfy himself that Valdez has a valid check. Valdez had it: he had his driver’s license with an address matching his wife’s on the check. That’s what the would have wanted, reasonably, if he was the one with no arms. And there was absolutely no reason not to bend the rules. The ADA wasn’t necessary to solve this. People need to know when to consider the impact of their conduct on others when there are no laws involved.

Any individual, and any bank, that needs a law to remind them not to insist on a thumbprint from a man with no thumbs is ethically impaired, and has no common sense. And having no common sense is a much greater handicap than having no thumbs.