February 2008

EthixBiz News: Book Coming; Author Live
Ask Dr. EthixBiz: Sleazoid Bosses
EthixBiz Review: Wikinomics by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams Gill's Benchmark Ethics: Wiki-ethics Anyone?

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EthixBiz News

Welcome to David W. Gill’s EthixBizine monthly---a free e-zine, distributed twelve times per year, for business leaders, managers, students . . . and anyone else interested in promoting more ethical business. Forward this free zine with your colleagues. Best to use the forward option below. Visit the www.ethixbiz.com web site for the EthixBizine Monthly archive . . . tools for re-tooling your ethics program . . . a complete menu of the EthixBiz consulting and training services . . . and more.

Author Live. David W. Gill will be speaking at the following events open to the public:

• February 19 (Tuesday, 12:00 to 1:30 p.m.): Marin HR Forum (www.marinhr.org) luncheon at the “Inn Marin” in Novato; reservations by noon Feb 15 to Jennifer Thompson at (415) 492-4172.

• March 12 & 13 (Wednesday & Thursday evenings): Two Symposia on “Beyond Damage Control: Ethics & Compliance 2.0” sponsored by the St. Mary’s College Graduate Business Alumni Chapter; 6-7 happy hour/networking; 7-8:15 program; same basic program, two locations; great conversation, resources, contacts, and Gill’s new book.
  
  Wednesday, March 12 Network Meeting Center, TechMart, 5201 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara. Responding to Prof Gill on March 12 are Larry Langdon (Global Tax Practice, Mayer Brown) and Song Woo (Lighthouse Management Group).
  
  Thursday, March 13 St. Mary’s College, Soda Center, Moraga. Responding to Prof. Gill on March 13 are Guy Erickson (Harris & Associates) and Robert Sher (CEO to CEO).
  
  RSVP to one or both events by March 10 to GBalumni@stmarys-ca.edu or (telephone) 925-631-4501 indicating which evening and location you and your guest will be attending.

Book Born. It’s About Excellence: Building Ethically Healthy Organizations by David W. Gill is finally coming off the presses the first week of March. Ordering info to come from EthixBiz over the next month but here are some basics: ISBN: 1-930771-34-7; $19.95 cloth; Executive Excellence Publishing, 2008; Tel: 1-877-250-1983. www.eep.com

Blog Busted. After a three or four month experiment the ethixbizine blog is being unplugged. Reason: EthixBiz people prefer to interact directly via zine@ethixbiz.com or ask@ethixbiz.com rather than meet at a separate site. Watch for occasional feedback and opinions in this EthixBizine—rather than at a blog spot. And yes: we want to hear from you.

Ask Dr. EthixBiz

“Covering Up for Sleazoid Bosses”

Dear Dr. EthixBiz:

A colleague spent more than ten years in ethically compromised organizations working under leaders who cheated on their taxes and had business officers cover it up, lied to employees about budgets and benefits costs, conducted extramarital affairs in the workplace, and committed general employment policy violations . . . . the stories are worthy of TV. This person believed it was her job to find creative ways to spin these compromises to staff and the result seems to have been a dulling of her ethical conscience. How might you advise her to sharpen her ethical conscience and now speak diplomatically and confidently about what’s true in the workplace?

—Susan P.

Dear Susan:

Your colleague was in a tough position—not quite doing the bad stuff itself but asked to cover it up. Letting it go on for ten years is indeed a recipe for a dull, inattentive conscience.

But it could also be a recipe for some jail time and a real career buster. If we know about illegal activity (tax cheating, lying to employees, violating policies) and don’t report it, we are legally liable for participating in the cover-up. We are accessories to the crime. We don’t even have to be active in the deception as your friend was; just being silent about crimes is enough to court serious trouble. Fear can be a great motivator for change. Your colleague---and her bosses—need to be fed the daily stories of companies and careers destroyed when people get caught.

Love, however, is an even better motivator than fear. What I mean is that business people need to be challenged and inspired to aim higher. They need examples of successful companies and leaders with great character and ethics. Feed your colleagues and bosses a constant stream of stories of ethical excellence in business. I just read this morning about Southwest Airlines’s financial performance, on-time record, and customer and employee satisfaction for last year: top of the airline charts for something like the 35 th year in a row. People need to know that you don’t need to operate like (for example) CEO Glen Tilton and United Airlines; you could go the route of Herb Kelleher, Gary Kelly, Colleen Barrett and Southwest Airlines.

 So as a friend I would challenge and encourage my cover-up colleague to be all she can be, to aim higher and do the right thing, to build relationships with colleagues of character, to be the kind of person her kids can be proud of some day, to caution and pressure her bosses to clean up their own act, avoid disaster and achieve their own potential and greatness. She needs some support to make and sustain such changes---maybe you and a couple other colleagues meet once a week as a coffee (and support) group. If things get too bad she must blow the whistle and (probably) find a new job. Her support group can help her know when that point is reached.

—Dr. EthixBiz

Remember: Everybody has a right to “Ask Dr. EthixBiz.”
Send your questions and hard cases to ask@ethixbiz.com

The EthixBiz Review

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams (Penguin/Portfolio, 2006).

“Wikinomics” is defined by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams as “the art and science of mass collaboration”---or “the art and science of peer production.” The inspiration, of course, is Wikipedia---the online encyclopedia created by ten thousand volunteer authors, ten times larger than the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and fact-checked to roughly the same degree of accuracy.

Tapscott and Williams argue that today’s IT collaboration tools are bringing about radical changes in business and beyond. The successful business leader/manager will of necessity understand and utilize the new powers and possibilities of the wiki (Hawaiian term for “quick”) world.

Four basic principles run through this “wikinomics”: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. Openness means that transparency replaces secrecy. Hierarchy, in turn, is replaced by self-organizing peering relationships within and between organizations. Sharing replaces proprietary thinking. Acting globally represents a step beyond acting multi-nationally.

Tapscott and Williams describe seven models of wikinomic collaboration. (1) “Peer production” is exemplified by Wikipedia and Linux. (2) “Ideagoras” are forums in which both problems (without solutions) and solutions (without applications) are openly shared---inviting outsiders as well as insiders to invent answers. (3) “Prosumers” brings consumers into the design and production process, not just the purchase and use stage. (4) “The New Alexandrians” (e.g., the Human Genome Project) invite collaborative research among laboratories and between university and industry and see amazing advances in scientific knowledge. (5) “Platforms for Participation” describes things like Amazon’s reader review section, and other collaborative knowledge sharing sites. (6) The “Global Plant Floor” describes how not just parts but whole modules are produced in different places, shipped and snapped together at the last moment (e.g., Boeing’s newest planes). (7) The “Wiki Workplace” is exemplified by the “Geek Squad’s” development and subsequent incorporation into Best Buy.

All of Don Tapscott’s books (with several different co-authors) have been fascinating and insightful reading, including Wikinomics. I give this book a “buy” recommendation. Tapscott is a bit cheerleader as well as journalist---breathless with excitement about the possibilities (is it just me that feels exhausted at the thought of more info and chaos at a higher pace?). Tapscott acknowledges that there will be inevitable growing pains and adjustments but he really sees wikinomics as an irresistible trend.

Among the problems and challenges of the open, free, anonymous, wiki-world: If everything becomes common property, where does the profit motive get to do its motivational work? If everyone has equal access, how are things like expertise and truth preserved (e.g., Amazon reader reviews are notoriously unreliable; political sabotage of Wikipedia entries is not unknown)? As thought and action become more global and less local, what happens to cultural- and bio-diversity? Do we really want results that represent a homogenized, common denominator world? One universal account of the human genome seems like a wiki-win. But would mass collaboration confine us to a world of Olive Gardens, Starbucks, and CNNs? Oh joy.

Bottom line for me: some things will always best be done by individuals acting under their own inspiration and genius; most things benefit from collaboration at various stages; and some things benefit from mass collaboration of the wikinomics type. But not everything. To paraphrase Cisco (“no technology religion”), No wikinomics religion! Say Yes and embrace it when it aligns with your personal or corporate mission; say No when it doesn’t. Sometimes mass collaboration will lead to breakthroughs; other times it will lead to mediocrity and paralysis.

—David W. Gill

^Top

Gill's Benchmark Ethics

Wiki-ethics?

Ethics is a social and relational thing. It is about how we should treat one another (people and planet). It is largely a collaborative enterprise.

Creating A Code of Ethics

 With a few qualifications, corporate ethics can be helped by becoming a kind of “wiki-ethics.” The most obvious place to begin is with the organization’s code of ethics. Ever since I started researching, teaching, and consulting more than three decades ago, it has seemed to me that the best people to write a code of ethics are the practitioners in the trenches---not management, not HR, and certainly not some external consulting firm.

First of all, it is a question of expertise. Who knows the ethical temptations to cut corners or bend the rules in sales transactions like people in sales? Who knows the temptations and dilemmas of accounting better than accountants? In hiring better than HR? My approach is to ask all employees to describe how they spend their time on the job. Map out their business practices. Then think about a new employee hired to take on these roles and practices (maybe a new branch office somewhere). Assume that you can’t be available 24/7 to mentor the new employee through every possible circumstance. Now write a couple simple, clear, but adequate guidelines to help keep those practices on track: avoiding trouble, achieving the goals. A certain amount of editing and iterating is required before the code is ready to roll out but this is the core exercise. In the end, the code is radically better fitted to company reality than some abstract legalisms created and handed down by external authorities.

Periodically the guidelines need to be reviewed and updated: go back to the practitioners for this help. Could the code be posted on the company web site for a month, inviting and allowing employees to edit to text directly, Wikipedia-style? Not a bad idea at all, though (like Wikipedia itself) the final editorial responsibility must lie with management.

Second, a collaboratively written code like this is “owned” by the people. They wrote it, they own it. Wiki-ethics is not just about expertise but ownership. Usually, if we made something and own it, we embrace it, value it, and care for it. Wonder why company codes of ethics are generally boring and un-valued by employees? Because they are experienced as flawed abstractions coming from upstairs where they really don’t know what’s going on in our life in the trenches.

Interpreting, Applying, and Evaluating our Company Ethics

Company ethics training so often directs people to sit as isolated individuals in front of computer screens to fill out this year’s compliance and ethics training. But life and ethics is not like that. This is a distinctly second-rate approach to ethics and values training. Far better to bring people together in seminars, discussions, and focus groups to discuss issues, standards, and the best resolution of dilemmas that may come up. So too on line: better to host some threaded discussions and blogs about company ethics, than just a one-directional content presentation to passive viewers.

“Interpreting and applying”---figuring out what’s right and carrying out what’s right---are usually complex and challenging tasks in our organizations. Collaborating with others is an essential process in lifting our ethical health and performance above the norm.

“Evaluating” our ethics is also a process that benefits from wide discussion and commentary. All employees, not just all managers, should be surveyed about the strengths and weaknesses of our stated standards, our training, our performance on our ethics and values. Ethics audits and assessments must be “upward” (employees evaluating management and the company) as well as “downward” (management evaluating employees).

Healthier (and wikier) still, inviting suggestions and evaluations from outside the company is a move likely to add value. Competitors, partners, academics, community and family members---why not be transparent and open about our standards and guidelines and invite a broader input?

Preserve the Core . . . Stimulate Progress

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’s Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994) argued that sustainably great companies always demonstrated a kind of yin/yang dialectic of tenaciously preserving and guarding their core purpose/mission/vision/values on the one hand and radically, bolding experimenting/reaching/developing/growing on the other.

Collins and Porras give lots of business history and data to make their point but I think it is also common sense. We can embrace and benefit from chaos to the extent we are anchored to our core purpose. The criterion for evaluating the ideas and possibilities in the wiki-chaos is the potential to contribute to the purpose.

So too in ethics: the legitimacy of our ethics depends on its alignment with the organization’s core purpose and mission. Our code of ethics is an account of how to get there from here, how to treat one another, our stakeholders, and the environment in order to achieve our mission and vision with sustainable excellence and success. The organizational core mission and vision must welcome comment and seek ownership by all the members of the organization. But they cannot be open to negotiation to nearly the same degree as the details of the code of ethics. (if they are, what we are considering is an entirely new organization).

An open, collaborative “wiki-ethics” is the way to go—so long as it is anchored in a clear, strong, inspiring organizational mission and vision.

© 2008 David W. Gill.

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