Effective Communication

Labels: business ethics, the workplace

Stumble It!

"Who says cheaters never win"? asks Professor Kirk Hanson, writing in the journal of the Stanford Business School.

Hanson, the executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, says it's time our society faced up to a dirty little secret: "Players who use steriods in professional baseball, college coaches who have others take exams for their star athletes, high school students who cheat on the SATS, scientists who fake the results of their research, and CEO's who cook the books in American corporations, may all be acting rationally."

Acting rationally. What does that mean? Presumably, that these people are well aware of the risks they are taking; they understand full well that if the worst comes to the worst, their careers will be ruined or their reputations destroyed. Yet, they still go on doing what they're doing. Why?

No big mystery, explains Hanson. It's worth it!

"The answer is today there's so much to be gained by being just a little better than others - by hitting a few more home runs than any other professional baseball player, by getting to and staying at the very top of the modern American corporation, or by the absolute best in any other field. "

Pointing to the winner-take-all culture that pervades almost every area of American life, and becomes more pronounced every year, Hanson reminds us that salaries and other perks for those reaching the top of the ladder have gone crazy." For example, CEOs got 40 times what the average employee in their company earned in 1980 - and 400 times more in 2000! Similarly, the highest-paid baseball player earned $2.3 million in the 1988 season, and more than $20 million last year!

It's a mindset that has even seeped down into the schools. Parents of high school athletes are reported to be sometimes the most eager to try any drug that will give their child an edge. Tempted by the rewards waiting for them in the wings, some people climbing the ladder may do anything to get to the top, and some who have already made it will do anything to stay there.

So, in a society totally obsessed with the need to win at all costs, cheating has become mainstream. Even when a cheater transgresses the proverbial Eleventh Commandment by being caught in the act, we find less outrage and a more forgiving attitude on the part of the peer group.

What lies at the root of this superstar-or-bust mentality? It could have something to do, as Prof. Hanson suggests, with a kind of spiritual crisis in society, or lack of self-esteem on a mass scale. "Worshipping heroes and celebrities could be a substitute for finding fulfillment in our own relationships and service." Again, the media's penchant for placing celebrities on a pedestal may be an added factor. And on the face of it, the media love few people more than a celebrity who's caught cheating!

So what can we do about it?

Of course, the emergence of the "superstar society", and the "cheating society" that has resulted from it, has serious ramifications for the more "old-fashioned" among us who still insist on playing everything straight.

Where there's cheating, there's no such thing as a level playing field. In fact, if people believe everyone else is cheating and they can't get a fair share, they'll refuse to play at all. When employees suspect that fellow workers may be trying to cheat to get ahead of them, it makes extremely difficult for a company with the best of intentions to build a climate of trust. And so on.

As we well know, an individual's success in resisting any temptation to act dishonestly as an adult, will largely depend on the moral foundations laid during his earliest years. That, in turn, mostly hinges on parental example. (We'll be coming back to the theme of parental example, in a different context, in an upcoming post - stay tuned!)

Fine. But how do we counteract the factor we have identified as helping to trigger the itch to cheat in the first place: namely, the superstar syndrome?

I think Prof. Hanson expresses it well:

" We have to value 'doing your best', not just winning. Only a few high school basketball players will make it to the NBA. We can't have the vast majority believing they are losers. Only a few business people will be CEO's. The rest are not failures.

"Encouraging 'doing your best', will require all of us to compliment and celebrate the efforts by those we know and love. The spouse who works hard but doesn't get the promotion deserves a dinner out. The child who studies diligently but gets a C grade should be praised."

Some comments on how this is relevant to some disturbing trends in contemporary education follow in my next post.

Labels: business ethics

Stumble It!

When you're getting terrible customer service, opines veteran entrepreneur and columnist Norm Brodsky, don't be so quick to blame the company official you happen to be dealing with at the time.

In many cases, he says, the poor guy's employer is the one at fault, and he tells an interesting story - against himself - to prove his point.

And like many stories of this nature, it just could be that the lesson to be learned from it is relevant not only to the world of business, but can be applied to other areas of life as well.

Brodsky runs an archive-retrieval business. When customers ask to have boxes delivered to their offices, they charge a regular delivery fee plus a surcharge for priority service. As to be expected in any business, disputes over the charges arose from time to time. When Brodsky saw that a couple of his customer-services reps were giving in too easily, he made a rule: no credits could be issued without the approval of someone in management.

What happened then? Occasionally a customer placed a rush order and, for whatever reason, the box didn't arrive on time. In other words, there was nothing to talk about: the company was unmistakeably at fault.

An angry customer would call up and say: "Because it was late, we couldn't make any use of this stuff. You guys can stand on your head, but I'm not paying."

"I'm sorry," the customer-service person would reply, "we made the delivery and you have to pay for it." When the customer would continue to insist "Nothing doing!", the rep would say, "Well, you'll have to speak to a manager."

No question, the manager would waive the charge after hearing the story, but the damage would have already been done. Bad enough that the delivery was late, but the customer sees that they would have been charged for it anyway had no one complained. Then to top it all, he had to waste time arguing with a rpresentative of the company before he was transferred to a manager who cancelled the bill.

So the customer would go away thinking. "That damn service stinks!", and the company would consider themselves lucky if they ever heard from him again.

Thus, the rule that Brodsky laid down came back to haunt him. He now quickly grasped that establishing a rule to eliminate costly errors was not the right response. Among other drawbacks, good, faithful customers were being penalized for the sake of the one or two who tried to take advantage. A few employees with questionable judgement were tying the hands of perhaps the majority whose judgement was perfectly sound.

Now, he has adopted a completely different approach to the sticky problem of well-meaning but inexperienced employees who were a little too looose in passing credit. The real solution, he realized, lay in better training. His people had to be equipped with more knowledge and better tools to make the right decisions.

Rather than clipping their wings, with all that this entailed, time, effort and even money would have to be invested in order to get the potential offenders up to speed.

The point should be clear.

We're living in the age of instant solutions. In business, as in other areas of our lives, we're inclined to fall into the trap of shortcuts, easy answers, the least painful way out. Why do we make bad rules? Often, it's because we're not really attacking our problems head on.

Rather, we're avoiding them. And therein lies the danger - and the challenge!

Labels: business communication, business ethics, customer service, the workplace

Stumble It!

In the world of business, you find three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. When all's said and done, what does the last category have that the others don't?

It's not talent. It's not business acumen, or knowledge of the market. Nor is it intuition or a special knack for dealing with people. It's not even dogged perseverance nor good old fashioned luck.

According to the author of a new book by a billionaire philanthropist who founded a company that grew to be the largest petrochemical and plastics business in the world, there's only one answer to our question: character.

"Character," explains Jon M. Huntsman in the new work, "is how you act when no one is watching...Once dishonesty is introduced, distrust becomes the hallmark of future dealings or associations." He quotes the 18th century Scottish philosopher Frances Hutcheson: "Without staunch adherence to truth-telling, all confidence in communication would be lost."

Huntsman's book is aptly entitled: Winners Never Cheat: Everyday Values We Learned as Children (But May Have Forgotten). Indeed, his description of how his childhood values carried over to his later business life is most illuminating:

As a teenager, he writes, his father explicitly stipulate "a.m" or "p.m." when he ordered him to be home by 8 o'clock, but he knew very well his father meant 8 that night. Similarly, "there was no fine print to detail what was meant when he said he didn't want me driving the family Ford. Although technically, he only said I shouldn't drive that 1936 Ford coupe, he was including my friends." Although a lawyer might have counseled that technically and legally his friends or anyone else were not prohibited from driving the car, our future business tycoon knew better.

So why, asks Huntsman, do we employ the same feeble excuses in our business and professional lives when we are caught doing something we knew we shouldn't be doing?

"As we grow older, our rationale for not abiding by the rules would make a master storyteller green with envy.... We rationalize that immoral behavior is accepted practice. Shifting responsibility away from ourselves has become an art form."

Indeed. And I think we need to ask a pertinent question here.

In later life, the author clearly succeeded in sustaining, and building upon, the moral and ethical values that he had imbibed from his parents and teachers, and possibly other adults in his community, during his youthful days . Many others who enter the business world, as he intimates, are not so successful with this.

Some willfully cast off the moral and ethical values they had inherited at the very first opportunity. In other cases, the whittling away of acquired ethical standards may be more gradual, as young entrepreneurs from the best backgrounds slowly succumb to the unrelenting pressure and intensely competitive atmosphere of modern business.

But whether sudden or slow, if this erosion of principles is so commonplace with people who were indeed exposed to the right role models and a sound educational environment in their early lives, what chance will youngsters have who didn't have that privilege?

We've stressed it before. Parental example, whether for good or bad, is undoubtedly the most powerful influence on a child's moral and social development. The influence of teachers and other significant adults in the child's immediate environment shouldn't be ignored either.

And indeed, the process continues throughout life. College students watch their professors. Workers keep a close eye on their managers and supervisors. The less educated keep tags on the more educated. Civic and political are targets for emulation, one way or the other.

It's an awesome responsibility for all of us.

Labels: business ethics, the workplace

Stumble It!

Business consultant George Torok talks about a phone call - one of many similar ones - during his first days as a new entrepreneur. It's a story that must be very familiar to many business people and consumers alike, and if you're lucky enough never to have been bothered by this kind of thing in real life, chances are you come across the technique every time you logon to the Internet.

Somebody asked for him by his company name and told him he'd won a prize. Actually, two prizes, and what's more, he could choose them from a long list that included a personal computer, a trip to Club Med, a diamond pendant, a video camera and an "entertainment centre" (in plain language, a TV) that he could readily dispose of for a cool $8,000 in cash.

Well, what more could any guy want, but of course, Mr Torok was astute enough to politely enquire if there was anything he was expected to do in return for such extreme generosity. Not very much, he was told, just to purchase a little bit of advertising. And needless to add, our star salesperson was far less articulate in explaining the nature and benefits of the product she was selling than she had been in describing the wonderful features of the generous prizes.

Is there anything unethical about this kind of marketing practice? Technically speaking, maybe not: did the canvasser actually say that there were no strings attached when she first offered the prizes? At any rate, the "victim" in such situations gets off relatively lightly, since the deception lasts, at most, a few minutes!

But, of course, a person can be misled in all sorts of ingenious ways - ways that allow the perpetrator to plead that technically his hands have remained clean. And often the consequences are more serious and longer lasting.

Sometimes, one can mislead or deceive by simply remaining silent. In one of my articles on our site I wrote about a young entrepreneur who managed to swing a lucrative business deal while giving the other side the impression that she was representing her former employer. "They never directly asked me," she confessed, "so I let them believe what they wanted to believe."

In a very interesting - but to my way of thinking, disturbing - article on Fortune Small Business, Seth Godin, long regarded as a seminal thinker on the philosophy of modern marketing, relates another revealing incident involving the use of the silent technique. This one has a particularly ironic aspect.

In the 1980's a few enterprising opportunists bought some name-brand stereo speakers and packed them into a truck. They parked the truck behind a dorm at Harvard and started whispering, "Psst...Hey! You wanna buy some speakers?" Passersby assumed that the speakers were stolen, and therefore this had to be a great bargain. The stock was sold out in no time. Little did the students realize that they were paying the same price that they would pay at the local store, but of course, these back-street entrepreneurs didn't have to pay a dime in advertising, rent or the like...



Well, if you never thought appearing to be dishonest can be to your advantage, you have to think again!

But seriously...yes we are talking about something serious here. Godin's central thesis is that if you want to attract customers in an increasingly competitive world, you have to be prepared to tell lies, as long as your lies are essentially the truth.

An incredible feat of verbal gymnastics? Well, marketers are performing such feats every single day, he says. What the guys who sold the speakers did is essentially no different from the people who sell an obstensibly more sophisticated version of a gadget for $100 when the model that sells for $10 performs its function just as well. But since people believe that the more expensive version does a better job, so it does. And that's the truth!

Fine. If that's what makes the wheels of commerce turn round, OK. But it worries me all the same.

What do you think?

Labels: business communication, business ethics, customer service

Stumble It!