Category: Business Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Entrepreneurship, Ethics: General, propaganda, Publishing, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

While visiting Minneapolis, I took in the opening day of the new Ben Franklin exhibit at the Minnesota History Center in downtown Saint Paul. I’ve long ben a Franklin fan. To me, his far-reaching curiosity, big-picture viewpoint, multiple interests, creativity, willingness to question authority and even make fun of it, media and persuasion skills, dedication to the public good, and rise from poverty to a comfortable (even hedonistic) lifestyle are all traits that today’s entrepreneurs can learn from.

No one can question that he made many important contributions in science (adding vastly to our knowledge of electricity, inventing a safer and more fuel-efficient wood stove), diplomacy/statesmanship (bringing France in as a powerful and game-changing ally against the British during the Revolution, oldest member of the Constitutional Convention), literature and communication (best-selling author/journalist/printer/publisher who was successful enough to retire from printing at 42, and propagandist for causes and philosophies he believed in), entrepreneurship (training and funding printers for a multistate network to print and distribute his works, anticipating the Internet by about 200 years and the modern franchise system by at least a century), as well as civic good (co-founding a public library, public hospital, fire department, fire insurance company, postal system, philosophical society).

But what struck me were some of the contradictions—there are many others, but these two in particular need a second look:
Slavery
Franklin became convinced late in life that slavery was evil, and served as president of an anti-slavery society. Yet he not only owned slaves for over 40 years, but often published ads from slave-hunters in his periodicals, and refused to put his name on much of his earliest anti-slavery writing.

Integrity
Franklin is well-known for his moralizing, his aphorisms, and his commitment to honesty and integrity. Yet he broke his apprenticeship to his brother, ran away to Philadelphia before it was completed, and started as a printer without the papers necessary to show he qualified as a journeyman.

While none of us are perfect, it does seem that these areas of Franklin’s life, among others, need careful examination, with more detail than was provided by this traveling exhibit (which seemed to be aimed largely at children).

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

What motivated you to organize this conference?

You could say this was an alignment of some stars that had been orbiting for quite awhile. First, social responsibility (or sustainability, corporate citizenship and green) is a topic I’m very interested in, going back to when I was Manager of Environmental & Safety Communication at John Deere about 10 years ago. Next, I credit Rick Sauter, Communitelligence Vice President, who had initiated talks with Cisco about partnering on a conference. When the topic of social responsibility came up, there was an mutual a ha moment. Six months of planning later, we’re on the eve of New Models of Social Responsibility: A Virtual Global Summit with Cisco as our technology partner.


What do you hope people will come away with?

This may sound idealistic, but I would like this summit toRead more »

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Transparency vs. Secrecy

Guest post by Elizabeth Johnson

I was very proud of the notebook computer I had purchased a year ago; in my mind, I felt I had secured a good deal and that it was value for money. The only flaw (if you could call it that) was that it came with the Norton Antivirus security solution. Now I know that there are many people who prefer Norton as their antivirus solution, but it is just too complicated and bloated for my liking. I feel that it slows down my system and enters every nook and corner and leaves bits of it behind even after you’ve uninstalled it.

But hey, no harm done – it was a free subscription for a year (included in the price of the notebook), so I could enjoy the benefits for 12 months after which I was free to choose my own security package. Or so I thought, but Norton decided otherwise. Once I had it uninstalled and a new antivirus solution installed in its place, I found that I could no longer use Firefox to browse the web. I didn’t think too much of it – maybe there was some bug that Mozilla hadn’t yet addressed. So I switched over to Internet Explorer. But in a few days, IE too began giving me problems.

My system would read the network, it could even connect to Yahoo Messenger, but it just would not open any page in Firefox, IE or any other browser. I was at my wits’ end, until a friend who is also a software expert tried reinstalling Norton again. And voila, what do you know, the pages open as if by magic. So I was forced to renew my Norton license, or should I say my computer was held to ransom by Norton?

No, I don’t like the way things are, but I have to swallow my anger and lump it, because I cannot afford to buy a new OS or a new laptop just because my antivirus provider follows completely unethical business practices. This is typically what is known as anti-competitive behavior – you force your product onto the customer who literally has no choice in deciding for themselves. Companies have been criticized for engaging customers in opt-out marketing tactics where they are signed up for some service or product and must opt out of it explicitly if they do not want it. Very often, the customer does not know of this service until the hefty bill arrives at the end of the month.

But this behavior beats even opt-out strategies, because it has forced me to stay with Norton, something I find an extremely unpleasant experience. I know that I could get someone who is skilled in cleaning the registry to rid my system of these files, but with time being a major constraint, I decided to just let it go, but not without a letter to their customer service department complaining of their anti-competitive strategy. Is this the only way Norton can hold on to its customers?

This guest article was written by Elizabeth Johnson, who regularly writes on the topic of construction management degrees . She welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: elizabeth.johnson1 (at) rediffmail.com

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

Respect your prospect’s intelligence! It’s one of the points I make repeatedly in Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First–and with good reason. To succeed in business, you need long-term relationships. And you don’t get them by insulting people.

I could list bad-practice examples from now until the end of time. Every once in a while, I find one that just pisses me off because it seems to shout, “Hey, Stupid! Send us money!” The one that landed in my postal mailbox today was one of them.

It was a plain, typed envelope–with a sprayed barcode and a nonprofit bulkrate stamp. No return address.Yeah, I opened it–after all, Google’s AdSense checks can’t be identified from the outside.

Inside, a post-it with this text in a very UNconvincing handwriting font:

Shel,
have you
seen this?
Brian

Yes, three lines of text all lined up, and the name about under the question mark.

The sticky note was attached to (and amazingly precisely lined up with) a piece of newsprint. The front had an ad for a charity I’ve heard of but don’t contribute to. The back was a fake news story about the same charity.

No clue about who Brian might be, except that the fake article mentions the CEO’s first name happens to be Brian.

So just how stupid does this charity think I am? Am I supposed to be fooled into thinking this is from someone I actually know? That despite the bulk stamp and barcode, I was individually selected? Does a “news story” with no byline, no identifier about the paper it might have ran in? Or that the article and the ad just happened to be back-to-back and fit perfectly with no wasted space? Puh-leeze! Stopping only to be humiliated in this blog post, this mailing goes straight to the recycle bin.

Why, after all these years, do marketers continue to write, design, and distribute this crap? Do they really think we’re going to be fooled? Do they actually want dumb-as-a-slug contributors or customers who won’t ask embarrassing questions?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Media Ethics, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

If you search on Google for the word Google plus the exact phrase “Don’t Be Evil”, you get 366,000 hits. The company’s motto has been used at least since 2001, according to Wikipedia.

As someone who has been writing and speaking about business ethics for seven years, I applaud this motto. But I question its authenticity as it applies to some of Google’s actions. In other words, I see Google occasionally violating the motto with at least three sets of policies that–intentionally or not–certainly do evil.Read more »

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

Fascinating interview with Jonathan Porritt, long-time environmental activist and outgoing environmental advisor to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

I find this statement particularly worthy of discussion, and would love to hear what y’all think on this:

Still, he says there are also too many examples of corporate responsibility deployed by companies with fundamentally amoral business models that cannot stand up to scrutiny. He says a particularly stark example is the UK banking industry.

The corporate responsibility teams of UK banks have strong reputations, he says. “They were seen as extremely professional parts of those financial institutions … who used to win lots of awards.

“But the reality is they never, ever got close to the business model of those banks. They were never given access to the decisions being taken about changing the investment strategy, about rethinking approaches to risk, or about the balances of portfolio or a different approach to asset management.”

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Publishing

While going through the claiming process in the Google Books settlement (if you’re an author, you should do so too–by tomorrow!–so you get royalties if they sell your stuff, or can opt out), I discovered that my very first book, co-authored with a well-known NYC literary agent and a subject-matter expert, had been published as a paperback in the UK, by a different company, the same year the American hardback edition came out.

The book was published 29 years ago, and I never knew this. I wrote to my literary agent co-author, and he didn’t know about it either.

And a few years ago, I discovered that the publisher of my third book, published in 1993, had quietly put it back into print as an on-demand title, meaning they print one when someone orders it. Again, I was not told. In that case, I was pretty sure I’d gotten a reversion of rights, but the paperwork seems to have been lost when I moved in 1998. In that case, I was deeply opposed to putting the book back in print because I had actually written a much more comprehensive and more recent book. But since I couldn’t locate the note I’d received several years earlier, I couldn’t do much about it.

Don’t authors have rights in these situations? Shouldn’t a publisher be obligated to not only notify an author but actually obtain consent? Grrrr!

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

Since John Wiley & Sons is publishing my next book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I was very pleased this morning to discover a press release about its first sustainability/responsibility report.

Wiley’s press release includes ten accomplishments for the fiscal year just ended, addressing everything from responsibly sourced paper and lower paper consumption to carbon control to social outreach in its headquarters town of Hoboken, New Jersey–and eight goals for the current year, focused on broadening its impact beyond its own corporate borders.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Ethics: General Tagged with , , , ,

Exactly how did Bernie Madoff steal his billions? Why are Halliburton’s hands so dirty? What happened with corruption cases in the rebuilding of Iraq? Following a link from EthicsWorld’s e-newsletter, I came to a single URL that has multiple stories on corruption: https://www.ethicsworld.org/publicsectorgovernance/corruptioninvestigations.php#sec.

This is what we’re up against, those of us who believe in ethics.

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