This on corporate ethics from IncMagazine recently…
Like art, hemlines, and marriages, corporations go through cycles. These periodic but powerful historical chapters redefine what companies value as essential to their success and cultural identity. And, in parallel, what their finicky audiences demand from them. One such cycle started with the civil rights movement and elongated itself all the way through women’s issues and diversity. Another cycle started as 1980s environmentalism and has remained relevant as postmillennial sustainability. In the 1990s it was aggressive entrepreneurship and the rate of technology adoption.
We are now entering a cycle where ethical accountability will shape the way companies will be judged and valued. This isn’t ethics as ornament, as the accessory of the moment, but as a new systemic force and reality. [and yet] …there is neither a valid nor proven ethical infrastructure in place to track and monitor business ethics. Our putative watchdogs–auditors, corporate boards–have shown themselves to be easily fooled at best and part of the problem at worst.
This piece goes on to suggest things like televised board meetings, and other structural shifts. These will not be enough. There must and will be shifts of corporate mind. Opening meetings, executive tax filings, and corporate financials is important, but we must also find ways to open the hearts of boards, managers, employees, shareholders.
We (each of us and all of us) need to become more aware of what we do and how it is connected to everyone else, and be willing to do differently as individuals and organizations, to get more of what we all want. Corporate ethics, revised legal structures and third-party watchdogs won’t be enough. We need fierce hearts to begin to openly mediate between corporate power and ethical vision. We need to cultivate Corporate Compassion and Care and Connection, the clarity to distinguish between and the strength to hold all as dearly as we do our ourselves. And, given this tall order, we need to be willing to tolerate uncertainties and mistakes. This might be the toughest part, and real heart, of it all.
Begun a year ago rather quietly, this notion of Corporate Compassion is fast becoming the major theme here at GlobalChicago.