Category: Business Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, privacy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Acording to no less a source than London’s well-respected Financial Times, Facebook has admitted hiring a PR agency to spread stories questioning Google’s privacy policies.

I’m no fan of Google’s approach to privacy, and one of the reasons I still keep Eudora, my “throwback” e-mail system where the e-mail resides on my own hard drive, is that I don’t particularly want Google to have access to my outbox (I do filter some incoming mail through GMail). However, I’ve never particularly trusted Facebook on that score either. I simply stick to a policy that assumes anything I post anywhere is public knowledge, and I try to not post anything, anywhere, that would come back to bite me. Fortunately, I live a pretty transparent and ethical life, and I don’t really have much to worry about. And I’ve never been afraid to be controversial, or to be “ahead of my time.”

I’m also willing to stand up for what’s right. If Facebook chooses to “get even” with me for expressing outrage over this action, and suspends my account, so be it. I managed to live my first 50 years without any help from Facebook. At 54, I could live another 50 years without it if I had to.

Nonetheless, I am deeply appalled. Don’t we have anything better to do than to take our opponents down? I’m much more a believer in cooperating with our competitors (something I discuss extensively in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green). And if you are going to attack your competitors, at least have the decency to do it out in the open. This kind of smear campaign is what I expect from the lunatic fringe that has hijacked the US Republican Party, not from a company that has built its entire business model on cultivating surprisingly deep openness among its users.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility Tagged with , , , ,

On one of the green discussion groups, someone raised the question whether it’s appropriate to work with a company whose mission is at odds with your values—on the parts where your values intersect. So, for example, would a pacifist environmentalist work with a military contractor on a sustainability project?

The discussion came out of this New York Times article about the conflict between green purists and green pragmatists about working with military contractor Lockheed Martin.

I have a very definite opinion on this, and will post it over the weekend—but I’d like to see what others think. Will you please post a comment, below?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with

Does BP actually HAVE a working PR department? The latest bonehead self-inflicted assault on the company image was to prevent five Gulf residents, holding legitimate proxies, from entering the annual shareholder meeting they’d traveled all the way to London to attend.

This on top of the news that the company is suing the other companies involved in construction of the exploded rig for a combined $40 billion; BP has paid out about $4 billion in claims.

Boy am I glad I don’t have the job of making them look good to an increasingly skeptical public.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, propaganda Tagged with , , , ,

David Vossbrink, APR, a PR guy who happens to be the president of PRSA’s Silicon Valley chapter, wrote in regarding my recent article on a PR site, “Seeing Past the “Spin”: Debunking Five Dangerous Myths About Nuclear Power.”

Vossbrink called my attention to a speech by the late safe energy activist David Comey, of Friends of the Earth. Comey, addressing the nuclear industry’s own Atomic Industrial Forum, told them they have a major credibility problem, and that he wasn’t afraid to tell them about it because he knew they would never follow his advice to tell the truth, and therefore remain easy targets.

Comey referenced a British spymaster, Richard Crossman, who was in charge of “alien psychological warfare” during World War II. He outlined 7 key principles that Crossman put forth in a 1953 lecture:

  1. The Basis for All Successful Propaganda is the Truth
  2. The Key to Successful Propaganda Is Accurate Information
  3. The Most Successful Propagandist Is the Person Who Cares About Education
  4. To Do Propaganda Well, One Must Not Fall in Love with It
  5. A Successful Propagandist Cannot Afford to Make Mistakes
  6. The Propaganda Must Be Credible to the Other Side, Not Your Own [empahsis mine]
  7. Understatement Succeeds Best [the Brits used understatement to make the Nazis think they were only bringing a portion of what they could, and that they could inflict far more damage on their enemy]

An aside: Interestingly, while trying to find his speech online (which was critiqued in a journal published February 1975, and thus must be no later than mid-1974), I came across Comey’s description of the fire at the Browns Ferry, Alabama nuke in 1975 (which could have been utterly catastrophic, but once again, we were lucky). The Browns Ferry reactors, among 23 US nuclear plants using essentially the same design as the failed Dai’ichi reactors in Japan, had to be shut down this week because of tornados. At least they didn’t wait until the tornado created a disaster, as the tsunami did in Japan.

Unfortunatley, Comey was right: the nuclear industry still can’t seem to tell the truth. And fortunately, I believe that Comey was also right about what that means;  it should be easy to undermine the nuclear industry’s credibility and overcome the juggernaut, to make it clear that we as a society will not tolerate the construction of a single new n-plant or license extension of an existing one, and that we need to take active steps to decommission the ones already in use.

Let’s prove Comey right—get out there and organize!

Note: I will be glad to send the PDF of Comey’s full speech–write me at shel (at) principledprofit.com, subject line Send David Come Nuke Speech. I was not able to locate it online.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

The latest news from Daichi makes it clear: Nothing these officials say can be trusted:

Highly toxic plutonium has seeped into the soil outside the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power complex in northeastern Japan, officials say. The amounts detected in five different soil samples taken from the facility did not pose a risk to humans, safety officials say.

Yes, I am calling that last sentence an outright lie—a disgusting, damnable, and definitely dangerous dissembling.

Want to know the safe level of inhaled plutonium? Zero. The risks are lower if it’s eaten or drank. Breathing the stuff has a very high deadliness factor because it settles in the lungs.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

When is certification NOT a good idea? When the body doing the certifying owns the company being certified but doesn’t disclose this. Can you say “conflict of interest?”

“Tested Green” Environmental Certifications were neither tested, nor green.  The Washington, D.C. based company was apparently running a pay-for-certifications program and improperly stating that independent associations endorsed the certifications (the “independent associations” and Tested Green were all owned by the same person).

Ironically, the page where I first found this was trying to sell people on a high-priced and kind of dicey-looking conference about certification fraud. I had to dig around on Google until I found a link I felt comfortable sharing.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International Tagged with , , , ,

Early this month, I got an e-mail from a Professor Robert Brain, inviting me to speak at my full fee plus expenses for a rapidly upcoming conference in England. The topic he proposed was a bit off my usual topic, but one that I could handle.

Follow-up mails from a Professor Woodman Walker included a letter of agreement to sign and requested more information from me. I wanted to find out more about the parameters of the speech, so I asked for some phone time. Our interview was scheduled for 8 a.m. my time this morning.

In the meantime, I had asked my good friend Google to tell me what it new about these two “gentlemen.”

The results were not encouraging:

One of the links on that page led me to a full account of how the scam works. I also checked the Middlesex University staff directory. Oddly enough, the phrase “Robert Brain” brought back a listing of the staff directory, as you can see in the screen shot–but when I clicked through the directory itself, neither Robert Brain nor Woodman Walker showed up.

Now, I’ve had a few speaking requests that seemed pretty flaky at first, and turned out to be real. So I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Here’s an approximation of how the conversation went:

Me: “Good morning, this is Shel. How may I make your day special?”

Him: “This is professor Woodman Walker of Middlesex University, UK.”

Me (big, hearty): “Good morning, Professor. The first thing I need from you is the names, off the top of your head and you can give me contact information later, of three people who’ve spoken for you in the last year. There are some rumors about you on Google.”

Him: hangs up.

Speakers—be suspicious of any e-mail that asks for banking information in order to get a work permit (I didn’t get that far with him)—and don’t be surprised if a similar scheme shows up allegedly from a different school and different professors.

You’ve been warned!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics-International, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Two stories in today’s paper about high consequences for corporate greed—and both of them have significant environmental as well as business ethics interest.

First, a local company here in Massachusetts, Stevens Urethane, faces a five-year ban on manufacturing a technology used in making solar panels, as well as more than $8.6 million in assorted fines, penalties, and other costs. The company was found guilty of stealing the secrets of a competitor, and the judge’s ruing not only impounded more than a million dollars worth of revenue, but forbade the company from using a $2 million assembly line it had built to make the product. Punitive damages, attorneys’ fees, and reimbursement of the other side’s legal and expert witness fees combined to create the $8.6 million total.

But the cost of this business ethics failure is only 1/1000th of the costs slapped onto oil giant Chevron by the government of Ecuador. While the $8.6 billion amount was less than 1/3 of the court-appointed expert’s recommendation, it is still the largest damage award ere in an environmental damage lawsuit (and probably the first of many more around the world against oil companies, which have been sued for habitat destruction in Nigeria and elsewhere).

Ironically, this suit had originally been filed in US courts against Texaco (now owned by Chevron), and the company’s attorneys successfully argued that the case should be heard in Ecuador.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

I just had a very unpleasant experience buying a ticket on Delta Airlines’ website. And since, in writing and speaking about creating green, ethical, and expectation-surpassing business success, I often address customer service issues, I’m going to transform this crappy experience into a no-charge customer service consultation to Delta. I get a blog post; they get free advice. Deal?

1. Thou shalt prepopulate your required telephone “country code” field with the United States country code, especially if the passenger has a U.S. address. Most Americans have no idea what our country code is, and if they do know, they’ll type a 1. +001? You’ve got to be kidding.

2. When thee kickest back my form for not having the country code properly, thou shalt remember my preference on whether I want travel insurance, and not subsequently kick it back out because YOU unchecked my preference.

3. Thou shalt load pages in a reasonable time. If I can read one to three e-mails every time I wait for my page to update over my broadband connection, you have a service delivery problem. And when the session requires 20 or so pages because of all those ridiculous kickbacks for the country code or the insurance, you have a frustrated customer spending half an hour of forever-gone time and computer eye fatigue in order to complete a transaction that should have taken under ten minutes.

4. Thou shalt not tell me my session has timed out while waiting for YOUR page to load, and then not really mean it, causing confusion. Fortunately, I’ve seen this before and just hit the back button several times until I got to a screen that remembered I was actually still logged in. I’d have been pretty annoyed if I had to log out and relog in.

5. Thou shalt not try to route me from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale via New York. It would be faster to drive! If you have to send me in the wrong direction, how about someplace a whole lot closer?

6. Thou shalt not try to take 40,000 of my hard-earned miles for a measly domestic flight from New England to Florida. That should get me to Europe!

7. Thou dost earn my gratitude for a reasonable fare when I switched to cash, and thou didst receive my business as a result.

8. However, thou shalt NEVER raise the fare between the time I click the Purchase button and the time you process my credit card! That, if you had been a human and not a computer, would be called an illegal bait and switch. That is also a way to get customers really mad at you and badmouth you publicly over blogs and social networks. If it says $230 when I hit Purchase, you should honor that price and not tell me, oh, by the way, we raised the price while you were having trouble with our webform. (Your exact words were “Due to changing availability, the fare you selected is no longer available. Here’s the lowest fare for your flight(s).”) Yeah, it’s only ten bucks, but it’s absolutely inexcusable. It’s one thing to raise the price if I come back a day or even an hour later, but I had initiated the transaction at the offered price and you didn’t honor it. Your computers should simply not be allowed to do that (and airline sites in general should not be allowed to present ticket options that are no longer available).

9. Thou earnest back a few karma points for ease of seat selection. Thank you.

10. But thou losest them again for not telling me whether any of the flights serve meals, and if so, allowing me to state my dietary requirements. It would be easy enough to indicate meals, snacks, or no food, and if meals, to indicate needs.

OK, there you have my personal 10—not commandments but suggestions—that would improve your customers’ attitude toward you, deliver a much more positive experience, and create fans instead of reluctant buyers. If you want more, I recommend my award-winning eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. I’ll even give you (or anyone else who registers a purchase a the site) $2000 in extra bonuses for buying a $21.95 book. See, creating a good customer experience isn’t that hard.

In addition to his award-winning books, Shel Horowitz also writes the Green And Profitable (for business) and Green And Practical (for consumers) monthly columns.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government Tagged with , , , , , ,

According to Democracy Now yesterday, big polluters including BP and Dow have been exempted from environmental oversight on more than 179,000 stimulus-funded projects. You can read the entire very short item here.

My first reaction is “say it ain’t so, Joe.” But a little Googling shows it’s actually worse. According to the Center for Public Integrity’s original statement, the Obama administration was so eager to get stimulus-funded projects into the pipeline that it even granted a waiver for BP’s notorious Texas City refinery (site of a horrible accident in 2005), and claims…

…the administration has devised a speedy review process that relies on voluntary disclosures by companies to determine whether stimulus projects pose environmental harm. Corporate polluters often omitted mention of health, safety, and environmental violations from their applications. In fact, administration officials told the Center they chose to ignore companies’ environmental compliance records in making grant decisions and issuing NEPA exemptions, saying they considered such information irrelevant. [emphasis added]

Surely, there are better ways to restore our economy.

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