Category: Business Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Media Ethics, Shel's Personal Life

I got an invitation to join a social network called Xing. It’s a business-oriented group based in Germany.

It looked promising, so I started the sign up process. Got all the way down to agreeing to the terms of service. I do give these a quick scan, because sometimes there are unfriendly clauses. This was one of those times.

First, a thank-you to Xing for making the type nice and big and legible. I have no patience with TOS agreements in 8-point type and have bailed on some, or if I was really in a position to need the service, taken the extra step to copy into Word and blow it up big enough to read.

The first thing I saw that made me say “huh” was one of the grounds for termination:

If the User is a member of a religious sect or a denomination that is controversial in Germany.

I’m assuming this is to keep hate groups out, but it’s very strangely worded. What isn’t controversial, after all? But I’m not a member of any terrorist orgs so OK, I’ll let it go.

But then, I found this:

When the User posts his or her contribution to a forum, the User grants XING an unlimited, irrevocable and assignable right of use for the respective contribution, which XING is entitled to utilize for any purpose. In particular, XING is entitled to keep said contribution on the forum, and on its Web sites and the Web sites of its partners, or use it for marketing the forum in any other way.

Consequently, XING has a right of use over all contributions to discussion forums it operates. Duplication or the use of these contributions or their contents in other electronic or printed publications is prohibited without the express written consent of XING. Copying, downloading, dissemination, distribution and storing of the contents of XING and/or third parties, with the exception of the cache memory when searching for forum pages, is prohibited without its express consent.

Um, excuse me, but no. I make my living as a writer. I want the ability to repurpose my own posts without crawling to Xing for permission. I certainly recognize Xing’s need to display and desire to have the option of parading my stuff around–but not if they don’t let me do the same. So this is what I submitted on the contact form:

Question About Terms of Service

I have a question about Clause 12, and I can’t really complete the signup until this is answered. As currently written, this transfers all rights to you from the poster. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take the nonexclusive rights you claim i the second paragraph, and then in the second paragraph after the words, “Duplication or the use of these contributions or their contents in other electronic or printed publications” INSERT “by anyone other than the original author of the forum post”

As a professional writer, I am quite concerned about my intellectual property rights. If I were to join under the current language, I would not contribute any forum posts (and I’m someone who posts extensively to Internet discussions)–because I wouldn’t want to ask permission to use my own words in a blog post, article, or book at some point.

I’ll let you know their response.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics: General, Media Ethics

The always-fascinating Grok.com has an article on the ethics of altering old news to reflect current realities, and how the New York Times search engine strategy is bringing up a rash of complaints from people profiled unfavorably in old stories.

Interestingly enough, I was recently listening to part of Orwell’s “1984” on tape–the part, as it happens, that profiles Winston Smith’s typical day at work–altering old news stories to fit the current politics of the dictatorship.

I’d forgotten that’s what he did for a living. Yet this is one of the most chilling parts of that whole very chilling story. I have to re-read it–it’s been decades!

the Grok story generated quite a few comments (16 so far). The most cogent, in my opinion, was from David Meerman Scott, a well-known PR writer–here’s an excerpt:

My opinion is that the news should always be maintained as originally written. However I do see wide applications of social media tools to amend news, much like a comment or trackback does to a blog post.

News happens and then things change. It is inevitable. Imagine a story about, say, “Czechoslovakia.” But then the country disappears into the “Czech Republic” and “Slovakia”. That does not change the opinion of the reporter or what was said when it was first published. A comment–style addition saying that Prague is now the capital of the Czech Republic would be helpful to a story about Czechoslovakia but I would not advocate a search and replace strategy to make wholesale changes to pre-existing news.

I agree with David. It’s fine to annotate old news stories to reflect current realities/correct errors–but it’s definitely not OK to alter stories and claim they were in the original. I also agree with Brad Waller’s comment that the Times could benefit greatly by adding updated links and corrections, making the story fresh and relevant again.

Shel Horowitz, author, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and founder of the Business Ethics Pledge, https://www.business-ethics-pledge.org

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability

I just learned that Dame Anita Roddick died yesterday, at the young age of 64.

Roddick was a woman of great principle, one of the leading lights of ethical and socially/environmentally conscious business. The founder of The Body Shop, Roddick embodied the idea I write about in Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First that doing good in the world, through business, is a pathway to doing well financially.

Starting from almost nothing, she built an international chain of socially responsible cosmetics shops, and she never forgot her commitment to the earth and to justice.

Not that she didn’t have her own blind spots. The obit in the London Daily Telegraph offers a thorough resume of her life in both business and activism, from the rough childhood to becoming the fourth-richest woman in Britain. Many of her causes are listed, and so are the many places where purists found her lacking or even hypocritical. It makes fascinating reading.

Speaking of reading, Roddick wrote several books. I read Business As Unusual, which was done in copper-colored ink and a bizarre layout. I think some of her other books were easier to read because the design didn’t get in the way.

Dame Anita, you will be missed.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics: General

Note from Shel: I’ve been reading Chris’s ethics blog for a long time and he’s listed in my blogroll. i liked this enough that I asked for permission to post it here.

The Mission of Your Mission Statement vs. The Value of Your Values Statement
By Chris Bauer

A frightening number individuals and companies say they really don’t need a values statement because, after all, everything is covered by their mission statement. That’s a sure sign that either the mission statement or its application needs some serious work. Both are frequently the case.

Mission statements are intended to be a summary statement of why your organization exists and concisely let the world know what your purpose is. That is, after all, what a mission is.

A values statement, on the other hand, should equally concisely tell your employees, along with the rest of the world, the essentials of how your business runs. Among its most critical functions, a values statement needs to:

Make clear to employees the values that are to inform their job behavior all day, every day. In other words, when there isn’t a rule for something, or when there are multiple possible ways to make a decision, your values statement should effectively guide their choice regarding what to do.

Allow employees to unambiguously judge the appropriateness of every action in their working day by discerning whether or not those actions or are not aligned with your stated values. (This should simultaneously be a great tool for helping employees judge the ethics of their actions or intended actions.)

Accurately tell the public what values they can expect to see brought to life when dealing with your company.

The value of a well-written values statement is enormous. It not only creates an easily-applied guide and gauge for the appropriateness of any employee’s behavior at any time, but can equally easily be used as the foundation for building better management, leadership, and customer-service at all levels of your organization. After all, if each of these functions were to be constantly driven by your most important values, wouldn’t that necessarily assure both significant and positive changes?

Could your organization use help in developing a values statement that will drive better management, leadership, and customer service all while simultaneously helping assure ethical conduct at all levels of your business? Contact Christopher Bauer by return email or by using the electronic comment card found by clicking here. Thanks!

copyright 2007 by Christopher Bauer – all rights reserved

(Information on Bauer Ethics Seminars is available at www.bauerethicsseminars.com.)

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International

No matter what your position on the Iraq war, I thought we could all agree that…

  • It’s a good idea to keep weapons out of the hands of insurgents
  • Fraud and corruption that costs taxpayers millions of dollars should be stamped out

    • Well, apparently the federal government doesn’t agree. A shocking AP article (as reprinted in the Santa Barbara News-Press) details severe repression against several whistleblowers who reported just such things in Iraq–ranging from demotion and harassment to 97 days in prison outside Baghdad!

    For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

    There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

    He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers – all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

    Shameful, absolutely shameful.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Ethics: General, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Politics

    Knowing that any entry in a Wiki can be changed by any reader, I’ve always been a bit suspicious of what I read on Wikipedia. Still, I find that Google often points me to Wikipedia articles, and most of the time, they seem pretty authoritative and accurate (if I’m at all suspicious, I verify with other sources, and it usually checks out).

    Now it turns out I was right to be suspicious. Virgil Griffith, a grad student at CalTech, invented a system to track the IP addresses of people who change Wikipedia entries–and the results are scary. While the majority of changes are innocuous–correcting typos and that sort of thing, a number of well-known entities have deliberately distorted facts. A few among many examples:

    According to the Wired article (one of several from mainstream news sources, including BBC and ABC),

    Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

    The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization’s net address has made.

    So who’s been playing fast and loose with the truth?

  • The CIA edited entries about Iranian President Ahmadinejad
  • Diebold, the voting machine company, removed incriminating material about its machines and faulty election results
  • Someone at a Democratic Party computer edited the entry about Rush Limbaugh to call him Limbaugh “idiotic,” “racist”, and a “bigot”–and about his audience, “Most of them are legally retarded.”
  • Microsoft listed its MSN as a “major competitor” to Google, whle adding deprecating material to Apple’s entry
  • Wal-Mart toned down criticism of its labor policies
  • Even the Vatican removed passages about Sinn Fein’s Gerry Addams that linked him to a 1971 murder.

    • Needless to say, this raises a lot of ethical questions. As a start, it would seem logical that Wikipedia should keep a running, public list of any IP addresses that altered a particular entry–right on that page. And also, perhaps, each page could display its history, so that previous versions would be visible and readers could draw their own conclusions.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Ethics: General, General Commentary, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life

    A

    Very refreshing article in the New York Times about foundations not only not burying their mistakes, but actually looking at how they happened, what went wrong, and what to do better the next time around.

    Just a few years ago, it would have been astonishing for a foundation, particularly one as traditional as Carnegie, to publicize a failure. Today, though, many of the nation’s largest foundations regard disclosing and analyzing their failures as bordering on a moral obligation.

    “There’s an increasing recognition among foundation leaders that not to be public about failures is essentially indefensible,” said Phil Buchanan, the executive director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which advises foundations. “If something didn’t work, it is incumbent upon you to make sure others don’t make the same mistake.

    I see this as a welcome trend, and one that businesses can learn from. Failure is not something to be ashamed of. I had a number of failures in business before I started the one I’m in now, back in 1981–and even then, it had to change with the times. It has reinvented itself several times, and I feel another reinvention percolating (don’t know how it will shape up yet).

    Entrepreneurs almost always have failures to “brag” about. otherwise, we wouldn’t be entrepreneurs, because in order of succeed, you have to take risks.

    When asked about has many failed attempts to develop a light bulb, Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have
    successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” (Quoted in The
    World Bank. 1994. World Development Report 1994: Infrastructure for
    Development. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press and cited here.)

    I’ll tell you about a few of my failures over the years, within my current, successful business:

  • Around 20 years ago, I tried to start a state trade association for resume writers, without having any idea of how much work would be involved or how much direct mail I’d have to do to get a viable membership. I actually got a phenomenal response to my first mailing (somewhere around 8 percent, I think), but that left me with something like seven members.
  • I’ve been unable to find a publisher for a research-intensive book I’d like to do that requires a big publisher who can pay a big advance. Even though I’ve done one book with Simon & Schuster and two others with respected smaller commercial publishers, and even though I speak and write and am very visible on the Internet, agents think I don’t have enough of a platform to take on this project. Since coming up with this idea, though, I’ve done two more self-published books, to critical acclaim.
  • A few years back, I stepped into a catfight on one of the discussion lists I participate in–and watched the client referrals from that list shrivel up to a tiny fraction of what they’d been.
  • I set a goal some time back of doing a certain number of speeches at a certain rate of compensation, by a certain date. Years later, I still haven’t reached that goal.

    • I won’t bore you with the whole long list. But I do think it’s important to take stock, to reflect on the mistakes/failures as well as the brilliant successes. I’ve learned, I’ve channeled my energy into becoming not only more successful financially, but a better person. And it’s showing results.

    I urge you to admit and discuss your setbacks as well as your successes.

    Maybe I should add admitting setbacks to the Business Ethics Pledge.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability

    Apparently, 59% of the market isn’t enough for Scotts Miracle-Gro. The company is suing its tiny competitor, TerraCycle–a maker of compost made from worm poo, on trademark infringement grounds.

    Well, I looked at TerraCycle’s logo and trade dress, and then I looked at MiracleGro’s. Yes, they both use greens and yellows–but different shades, and in very different ways. The only similarity I can see is that they both use a circle to hold their logos. It’s one thing to trademark a truly distinctive shape, such as the McDonald’s arches. But a circle? Come on!

    In fact, TerraCycle makes a very clear distinction on its website. Its whole brand identity is as a no-artificial-chemicals alternative to products like MiracleGro, packed exclusively in reused soda bottles and other packaging that would have otherwise ended up in landfill.

    Hmm–sounds like a company I should feature in my monthly Positive Power of Principled Profit spotlight article.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics

    Apparently the phenomenon of a corporate executive posting anonymously in ways that he/she thinks will help his/her company/hurt the competition is called “sock puppeting.”

    I hadn’t heard this term until I stumbled on a New York Times article this morning, published Monday.

    The article cites not only John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, whose disgraceful and illegal behavior I covered here, but also…

    Conrad Black, CEO of Hollinger International–found guilty last week of mail fraud and obstruction of justice, and facing up to 35 years in the slammer.

    Says the Times:

    At the criminal fraud trial of Hollinger International’s chief executive, Conrad M. Black, prosecutors introduced evidence that the former press baron had once proposed joining a Yahoo Finance chat room to blame short sellers for his company’s stock performance.

    Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com (who claims that his real name was attached to his anonymous handle on every post–which, if true, makes it a very different situation, in my opinion).

    And it’s not just the business world, but also politics and media.

    Tad Furtado, at the time, policy director for New Hampshire Congressman Charles Bass (who lost his re-election bid in a perhaps-related development).

    Journalists are not immune either:

    In April 2006, The Los Angeles Times pulled Michael A. Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, off of his blog because he had posted comments on blogs under an assumed name while feuding with readers. In November, New Republic magazine suspended its culture critic Lee Siegel after it determined that he had been energetically defending himself in the discussion forums of his New Republic blog, under the name “sprezzatura” (Italian for “making the difficult look easy”).

    Of course, there’s the related phenomenon of journalists writing under their own identity, but not disclosing that they are also acting as paid PR flacks, such as Armstrong Williams shilling for the Bush administration. I’ve written about that one, too.

    Meanwhile, there are those of us still out there fighting the good fight. If you haven’t signed the Business Ethics Pledge yet, I urge you to do so.

    I plan to write an essay, “When Even Whole Foods Cheats.” Rest assured, it will be published under my own name, and whatever plugs it may make for my book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, it will make them honestly.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    And both of them less-than-easy to link to!

    Chris Bauer’s e-newsletter posed the scenario of a disconnect between a company’s ethics policies and its other behavior.

    If you are in an organization with a CSR program that seems out of synch with the rest of its actions, you may have a great opportunity to lobby for a better alignment between your organization’s stated values and its actual actions. The strategy to use? Simply point out the CSR program as a great example of fulfilling the company’s stated values and contrast that with its other policies and actions. If the contrast is glaring enough, you may have a shot at driving your point home, assuming you know how to pick the right audience and style for your remarks.

    I can’t find it on his blog. But I bet if you contact him and ask for a copy of “Corporate Math: A Right + A Wrong = ?”, he’ll be happy to send you one.

    Meanwhile, in a June 15 post, Chris MacDonald applauds cereal giant Kellogg’s agreement to stop spoonfeeding its sugar- and chemical-laden stuff to kids watching TV, even while acknowledging that the company is probably dong this for less-than-altruistic reasons. There seems to be no way to capture the permalink and link to it, but you can find it on the June 2007 archives page.

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