Category: Business Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Politics

A day after the Texas, Ohio, RI and Vermont primaries, and the Democratic nomination is once again totally unclear. It’s time to ask how social responsibility issues will affect this election.

Both Obama and Clinton are talking about change, but neither is really putting forward a dramatic change agenda. Clinton has taken heat for her vote for the war, Obama (whom I’ve endorsed, in spite of his shortcomings) for what seems at times like empty rhetoric, and McCain for flip-flopping on torture and on campaign finance reform. And both Clinton and Obama have made some good noises on climate change.

Meanwhile, I haven’t heard any of them talking about business ethics, a meaningful exit strategy in Iraq, or the questions of poverty raised by the Edwards campaign–to name just a few.

I think the American people are ready for a candidate who is willing to go beyond rhetoric and propose substantive social change, especially in health care and the war. Unfortunately, the Democrats have driven out the multiple candidates who put forth those positions, the Republicans apparently have no interest, and our system treats third parties as thrown away votes (unlike most of Europe).

Meanwhile, the mainstream media focuses on “soma” (a word invented by Aldous Huxley in his book, Brave New World) like the shenanigans of Britney Spears.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Web 2.0/Social Media

Yeah, I know–viral marketing and all that. And I actually love referral marketing, but not like this.

But am I the only one offended when someone gives me a tell-your-friends page before I even see the product? It’s happening more and more lately. These unfortunates happened to be the ones to push me into ranting about this trend, but it could have been any number of others.

At least these guys were smart enough to do a “no, thank you” link where I could still get the download. But I value my reputation and I’m not in the habit of sharing e-mails of my friends with strangers who send bulk mail. Had the only way to get the report been to fill in e-mails, I’d have either given phony names or bailed out.

Maybe this is one of the factors contributing to the growth of social media at the expense of e-mail. Successful marketers can still be clueless when it comes to human relationships.

In fact, when I get to all those petition sites (and I confess, I sign a lot of political petitions), the thank-you page invariably asks for addresses of my friends. I never give them. Instead, if I find the petition worthy enough to send, I’ll forward the e-mail, bcc, to my politics list.

And at least there, I’ve had a chance to see the text, decide if it’s something I want, and pass it on. Why marketers think I’m going to feed their mailing-list fish tank before even seeing the fish… Yuck!

If you like this rant and want more about how to run and market an ethical, successful business, you may have a look at my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. You can get the first few chapters as a no-charge download, and you don’t have to fill in a squeeze page OR a tell-a-friend page to get it. So there.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government

Lest you think collusion between corrupt government and dubious business interests happens only in the US–read this article on the firing of Linda Keen, until recently the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

Keen was fired for having the temerity to insist that the 50-year-old Chalk river nuke in Ontario stay closed until safety concerns were fully addressed.

Now, let me disclose my biases. I’ve been studying about nuclear power going back to a college report I did in 1974–and my first book, in 1980, was an expose of the nuclear power industry. In my mind,

  • there is no such thing as a safe nuke (and a wide swatch of the Ukraine is still uninhabitable, more than two decades after the accident at Chernobyl)
  • waste storage will cause problems for thousands of years
  • counting the entire fuel cycle, nukes are a net consumer of energy–so we’re not actually gaining anything by using them
  • solar, wind, and other nonpolluting, renewable technologies make a lot more sense

    • Why was the plant ordered to stay shut?

    In the inspection process, the CPSC regulators found something at the 50-year-old reactor that was terrifying:

    …the reactor had been operating for 17 months without two cooling pumps hooked up to an additional emergency back-up power system capable of withstanding a severe earthquake.

    And yes, there have been earthquakes in the vicinity. And this plant is only two hours from Ottawa, Canada’s capital city.

    But still…here is a woman who was fired because she didn’t want this ancient and probably crumbling nuke to have an accident! Best of luck, Linda in your wrongful termination court case. And thanks for doing what’s right.

    (my thanks to The Weekly Spin for alerting me to this story).
    Business and government ethics violations that directly put life and property at risk are more than just crooked collusion. They are criminal acts.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    Patrick Byers’ Responsible Marketing blog quite correctly calls attention to Pfizer’s Lipitor ads featuring artificial heart inventor Robert Jarvik–only, it turns out, in the ads featuring “Jarvik” rowing or doing other highly physical activities, it’s a professional athlete, a body double.

    There are times you could make a case that using an endorser’s double is legitimate–but not, IMHO, when you’re advertising a product for the greater physical endurance it supposedly provides, having an internationally known cardiologist endorsing it, and you replace a man who is “about as much an outdoorsman as Woody Allen. He can’t row” with an undisclosed professional athlete.

    Byers implies that this is not ethical–and I agree with his assessment.

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

    Yesterday, I was listening to an interview with a very smart-sounding marketing copywriter. It was all about trust, integrity–the stuff I talk about in this blog, in my award-winning book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and in my ethics newsletter.

    Thinking that this was someone I needed to know, and thinking about all sorts of mutual-benefit ventures we could do, I went to the writer’s site.

    And boy, was I shocked!

    It was a hard-sell, blowhard, I-know-so-much-more-than-you snow job, and the only credibility builder was the very generous use of testimonials. Let’s just say I did NOT feel ready to trust him.

    Well, guess who I *won’t* be approaching with any partnership offers. We’ll never know what might have been, because he led me in expecting one sort of thing, and delivered something entirely different.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability

    Thoughtful article by Mallen Baker in the UK publication Ethical Corporation, discussing a number of specific companies who’ve been called on the carpet for greenwashing: claiming to be more ecological than they really are.

    As one among many examples:

    Shell, which said “we use our waste CO2 to grow flowers”, was in breach of the advertising code because the wording could be seen to imply that all the company’s waste CO2 was so used, not just 0.33 per cent of it.

    The result of this corporate misfeasance is not surprising. As Baker notes,

    According to a recent survey, 80 per cent of Britons now think that companies simply pretend to be ethical in order to sell more products. Widespread cynicism over all the claims has set in, and is hardening with every ill-judged poster or TV ad. Nobody can see an ad with flower petals floating from the exhaust of a motor car and be anything other than cynical.

    Oil companies are often making green claims, which I’ve learned to treat with skepticism. Yet I admit to being fooled occasionally. I once profiled BP as the socially responsible company of the month in my Positive Power of Principled Profit newsletter on the basis of its stated policies and actions on environmental responsibility. Later, I found out that BP still has quite its share of environmental problems, even disasters.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, media-general

    Is it outright deliberate deception, bad science, or merely urban legend run amok?

    The widely cited study that claims the manufacturing and transport of Prius batteries has worse environmental impact than building and driving a Hummer has serious flaws:

  • It bases assumptions on the Hummer being driven for 379,000 miles, while the Prius gets retired after just 109,000 miles (and having owned many Toyotas, I can tell you that most of them are just hitting their stride at 100K); this alone is enough to completely invalidate the study
  • The issues about nickel mining are taken out of context and based on 30-years-obsolete data
  • In general, life-cycle issues related to cars skew 85% toward use over the vehicle’s lifetime, and only 15% to manufacturing and distribution–so even if the Prius energy consumption has a higher front-load than typical, it’s not likely to be enough to overwhelm the energy savings during the car’s useful life
  • Oh yes, and no independent researchers reviewed the data

    • Two good articles with real data: This very readable one from the Sierra Club, and this more technical one from Pacific Institute (it’s a PDF).

    I would be very curious about what economic interests were behind the original claim–which got picked up by George Will, among many others.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary

    Chris MacDonald’s Business Ethics Blog has a very amusing article on the Mafia’s Code of Ethics, in which he extracts business success principles from the until-recently-secretMafia’s 10 Commandments.

    As one example:

    #3. Never be seen with cops.” (i.e., avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest)

    Chris doesn’t do permalinks on his blog, so to find this post, dated 11/11/07, use the search bar to hunt for ” Business Ethics, Mafia Style”.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Publishing

    It’s bad enough that sploggers go around lifting articles and slapping them up on splogs (spam blogs) with no paragraph breaks and a bunch of Google ads.

    Now, Business Week reports on professor Philip M. Parker, “author” of 300,000 scraped books.

    I am sorry, but setting a computer robot to pull data from a topic is not authorship. While as a multi-source compilation it probably doesn’t qualify legally as theft, it certainly leaves a bad taste in my mouth! Some of “his” reports sell for as much as $495, too.

    Yuck!

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics, Politics

    My guest blog today is on whether the Code of Ethics, and self-regulation among bloggers generally, may help keep regulators out of blogs.

    Also, my previous posts on that blog have attracted comments. In my response to one of yesterday’s comments, I brought up the strange saga of the insults hurled at members of the U.S. championship women’s bridge team, who have been accused by other bridge players of treason and sedition for holding a sign at the awards ceremony in Shanghai, declaring that they did not vote for Bush.

    Well, it may not be to the liking of some conservative bridge players, but it’s a long way from the definition of treason or sedition. One could actually make more of a case that bush and some of his cronies have committed treason.

    Last time I checked, it as enshrined in the Constitution (specifically the First Amendment) that Americans have a right to free speech. Whether or not this was an appropriate forum could be discussed (especially in the context of the self-regulation versus outside regulation question I raised on the IAOC blog), but the right not to be silenced is guaranteed, at least in theory.

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