The ongoing public disclosures about sexual harassment and abuse that have filled the news since mid-2017 have led to a major cultural reckoning. Courageous people have come forward to share stories about inappropriate and dangerous behavior of high-profile individuals. The public discourse about these people who were violated by abusers and predators with the complicity or support of other individuals or organizations has, to this point, focused largely on bringing these offenses to light, in order to listen to and believe in victims, so that they may be supported and empowered as survivors and as bearers of new societal norms.
Tag: corporate values
The 2017 movie The Circle, based on the 2013 novel of the same name by Dave Eggers, is about the impact of commercial technology on human life. It poses common ethical and moral questions about privacy and security in a time of interconnected information sharing via social media and networked devices. The movie is a thriller which centers around a tech giant that offers advanced products and services that have transformed the way people do business and interact with each other by placing all interactions on various platforms and networks with ratings and sharing capabilities.
While the high-tech immersion depicted in The Circle is not yet current reality, technology is developing at a breakneck pace and social media platforms, the Internet of the Things, and services driven by algorithms and other artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly ubiquitous with each passing day. At its core The Circle is concerned with overreach of these technologies and the companies that develop and market them, and the ethical problems and moral challenges that can arise from human and societal interaction with them.
- Secrecy as dishonesty – One of the central philosophical proclamations of The Circle is when the protagonist, Mae, is confronted with a legal transgression she committed and in her reckoning with her actions states, “Secrets are lies.” Mae’s central thesis is that she would not have committed her crime if someone had been watching or aware of what she was doing. Therefore, the suggestion is that secrecy is a form of dishonesty. Disclosure, on the other hand, is the ultimate truthfulness and in this perspective, is valued over privacy. Privacy enables people to lie and conceal, and therefore leads to misconduct and distrust. Individuals giving up their expectations of privacy would supposedly lead to greater overall security and trust. The tension between liberty and safety is not an unfamiliar one in society. The dilemma of which takes precedence will be an on-going and dominant moral dilemma.
- Transparency overload – It’s easy to agree that transparency and openness encourages honesty and communication. Clear and public disclosure of organizational activities and values provide strong incentives for making the best ethical decisions and keeping integrity in mind when planning business strategy. However, the admirable mission of transparency is subject to subversion, as The Circle Claims of public transparency can be selective, creating an impression of a company that values openness and progressive values when in reality it is picking and choosing disclosures while hiding malfeasance and abuse behind this self-selected façade. Also, going too far in claiming transparency on a personal level can be too much of a good thing. As above, the tension between personal privacy and public disclosure is a delicate balance which must be worked thoughtfully.
- Surveillance and consent – In promotion of corporate and societal values of transparency and shared disclosure, the company in The Circle introduces a service where tiny cameras are embedded everywhere out in the world. Some of the cameras are installed intentionally by users who wish to share, but others are placed in a variety of public locations without notification or permission to do so. The video streaming from the cameras are publicly available online for searching, indexing, and manipulation. While being able to see a high-definition and flexible feed of the surf at a beach is appealing for a number of reasons, cameras everywhere in public, regardless of their utility or entertainment value, can also be used by both private and public concerns to conduct surveillance. As these cameras are in some cases posted without consent or knowledge, this surveillance is vulnerable to unintended uses and can represent, as above, serious risks to personal rights and privacy expectations.
- Cybersecurity – The company in The Circle develops, markets, and sells a technology service. Therefore the people who buy what they market are not only purchasers or customers but also users. They have heightened expectations and rights for protection by the company as such. Not only is the extent to which their data is collected by the company questionable (even when the users are intentionally sharing it in an excessive or imprudent manner), but the company also is obligated to store it, and may violate individuals’ rights by viewing it, accessing it, analyzing it, or not keeping it safe from intrusions by and alterations, deletions, or other misuses of, its employees or third parties. Cybersecurity risk management is a huge challenge for a company such as this one, which is clearly putting its commercial and societal ambitions over any fundamental value of information security that is discernible.
- Unethical decision-making – While the titular company in The Circle repeatedly suggests that transparency can be a force for good and should be leveraged for this purpose by the widespread use of what boils down to be surveillance technology, reality of how humans use this technology show that its use and influence is not straightforwardly positive at all. Quite to the contrary, on many occasions in the movie disclosures and discoveries due to the technology are harmful to individuals and relationships. Despite the desire to incentivize honesty and normalize total disclosure, people end up getting hurt, both because of their own overzealous adoption of the technology and of the actions of others. In the most dramatic example of this, a person dies due to a series of events kicked off by a crowd-sourced surveillance operation performed at a company demonstration of their new service. Unethical decision-making, both in questionable design ethics by the organization and in immoral behavior by user-individuals, directly causes these tragic and disturbing events.
There are many ethical and moral dilemmas posed by availability of advanced technology which can encroach about privacy, security, and consent of individuals. Transparency, surveillance, and risks to information security and from cybersecurity are all common themes of The Circle as well.
The end of 2017 has been an explosive and revelatory time for public disclosures about culturally-pervasive sexual harassment and abuse. In most cases the reporting has focused on exposing various individuals, who committed their offenses with the full force of their power and prominence within their communities, organizations, and industries. All too often, the courageous narratives presented by the individuals who come forward to tell their stories include the fact that their harasser or abuser systematically prevented them from work advancement or access to work at all, in many cases withholding employment opportunities and in some cases, even coordinating with other men in positions of authority to prevent the women from working in the future.
The many (and continuing) disclosures about the inappropriate and dangerous behavior of these high-profile men has been a cultural watershed moment. Hopefully this heightened awareness will lead to a transformation in the public discourse about societal expectations around these dynamics, as well as justice for the women who have had their lives negatively impacted and their careers curbed or ended. However, many questions remain in what structural progress, if any, will come from the individual cases, no matter how numerous they become.
Thus far, far-reaching institutional responses to the misconduct of these individuals has been lacking or entirely absent. The best most organizations have been able to muster is routine HR statements that the accused men are being suspended or will resign, sometimes accompanied by saccharine denials of knowledge and expressions of regret, and seldom followed up with any significant sort of commitment to organizational change or an authentic intention toward setting a standard for corporate social justice.
Corporate boards and senior management at organizations under fire for the unacceptable behaviors of their principals and often most visible representatives have proven lacking in the unfolding of this cultural moment, which is driven by individuals and targeted at individuals. While certainly these are cases where bad people did bad things, it is important to acknowledge that they were empowered to do so, implicitly or in some cases expressly but with a blind eye toward their malfeasance, by the organizational structures which promoted and supported them and oppressed and marginalized their victims.
For more on the complicity of corporate leadership and the dubiousness of their malleability to change even amid the major societal focus on these issues, check out these great pieces from Wired: Corporate boards are complicit in sexual harassment and Making the silence breakers Time’s Person of the Year won’t change anything.
One particularly beleaguered institution that is confronting the limitations of its definition of its own institutional responsibility is the US Olympic Committee. Ethical and integrity questions about the actions of individuals associated with the US Olympic Committee are nothing new. Incidences of cheating, doping, and abusive behaviors by coaching and medical staff are, unfortunately, nothing new. Because the US Olympic Committee relies on a vast network of local personnel who train, recruit, develop, and support athletes often from a very young age. Under these conditions, athletes, their schools, and their families place tremendous trust in the representatives and related parties to the US Olympic Committee that they rely upon to bring their Olympic ambitions to fruition.
All too often, predatory coaches are reported by a victim only to have multiple other athletes come forward to say that they too were mistreated and abused. Organizations within the US Olympic Committee’s umbrella ban individuals proactively upon revelations of sexual abuse, and make efforts to distribute guidelines and ensure education, but underreporting of instances of sexual assault mean that predator coaches prey on athletes for entirely too long undetected.
The reality is, the US Olympic Committee has 48 national governing bodies underneath it which thousands of club teams and gyms underneath that. The sheer volume of organizational and administrative entities through which these abuses pass and would need to be addressed or investigated, all without a national entity or a mandatory supervisor to set a compulsory standard for this, is one of the greatest forces working against effective identification and removal of predatory coaches. In this context, major organizations such as the US Olympic Commission too often focus on removing individuals without identifying root causes or building defense structures against the underlying problems.
Changes are too often driven by media exposure and fear of reputational damage, and too infrequently motivated by compassion or justice. Until these institutions adapt their approaches to address sexual abuse as directly as they can their commercial concerns, and until adequate oversight and control measures are taken with meaningful enforcement actions to back them up, individuals will continue to be harmed.
Organizations must change from operating independently on these issues, which provides them with the plausible deniability of jurisdictional ignorance and a patchwork of ineffective rules and procedures for processing sexual assault claims and investigations. Instead, senior leadership must stand up and make these processes uniform and coherent so that they can be not just a pretense, but also effective in protecting individuals and taking responsibility. Only then can the brave testimonies of individuals lead to organizational change toward practices that will respect and protect them.
For more about the US Olympic Committee’s challenges in defining and enforcing a meaningful code against sexual abuse and misconduct in its ranks, check out this article from Harper’s Magazine: Pushing the Limit.
A successful and robust corporate compliance and ethics program will have a blended focus on rules-based and values-based controls. Taking an integrated approach to performance and conduct is necessary in order to facilitate awareness of and adherence to compliance risk management efforts and expectations. Rules and values cannot be separated, and should indeed be balanced together to make the most compelling call to action by employees and management.
Legal and regulatory guidelines and company policies and procedures form a clear foundation for the rules and make up the structural, mandatory portion of a compliance program. Deriving this from external and internal requirements is somewhat straightforward and can be accomplished with methodical planning and continuous updating and education.
Values, on the other hand, form the ethics discipline and come from the moral codes of individuals and the commitments to integrity made by the organizations within which they work. While more resistant to obsolescence than rules and regulations, values are far more challenging to identify and express, and even harder to imbed authentically and sustainability within a corporate culture. Values provide the voluntary motivation for doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason, despite forces or interests that may impede or work against that, and including when taking this action requires inaction.
Therefore successful compliance professionals will rely upon the basis provided by rules, while evoking the emotional and personal appeal of values. Providing incentives for inner success and enabling individuals to make ethical decisions and act with integrity gives purpose to employees and credibility to organizations.
The below TED/TEDx talks emphasize the importance of values-led people and organizations and the ways they impact society, interpret ethics, and define success.
- Why we need core values (James Franklin) – Similar to earlier TED/TEDx lectures shared on this blog, ethics in organizations and society in general begin with individuals. In order for individuals to define the internal moral registers and inform their ethical perspectives based upon them, they need to establish personal core values first. Adopting core values – inalienable individual ideas about right and wrong – is crucial in approaching life and work with purpose and conviction. Understanding core values helps to move on from failures productively, build on successes sustainably, and improve all relationships and ambitions. Individuals as well as the communities in which they live and organizations in which they work can all benefit from planning and mission statements which are grounded in individual articulated core values.
- The transformative power of values at work (Mika Korhonen) – Well-meaning human resources managers and consultants can too easily lose the root of employee motivation and awareness efforts – that employees are people too. The person an employee is outside of work, and the values he or she possesses in private life, must be leveraged in the workplace to create genuine engagement in both compliance culture and in daily work in general. Leadership and growth requires resilience to change, endurance through adversity, and cultural and social flexibility. All of these competencies are grounded in personal values which are practiced and supported on a daily basis in the workplace. Creating a positive, values-based environment enables a workplace that is productive and prepared to focus on positive impact consistent with ethics and integrity.
- Happiness – building a values led organization (Esther McMorris) – Ethical motivation is one of the distinctions between management and leadership. Managers who do not embrace a values-driven purpose do not establish credibility as leaders. On the other hand, ethical leadership that models exemplary conduct, supports integrity, and takes action against dishonesty or malfeasance, strikes an effective path toward engaged and effective management. Managers who are also leaders can approach their employees and partners with respect and purpose, allowing individuals to be true to the values that guide them. In this environment, true engagement and satisfaction is possible, giving way to happiness through values-led work
- Values change everything (Itzhak Fisher) – Culture, values, and leadership are the foundation of all change in life, work, and society. When all three of these are approached together with a strong ethical predisposition, then the resulting change can be directed positively and productively. In instances where integrity is lacking, however, and these three forces are not in balance, then change is negative and feels disruptive, scary, and threatening. Transforming and adapting are inevitable. Surviving these, however, and sustaining through them with the individual and the organization’s identities intact, can be done in reliance upon strong values and the purpose that comes from them.
- The power of why and value driven behavior (Martha Kold Bakkevig) – A lot of change in life and business is motivated by external forces – competitive pressures, evolving regulatory requirements, new stakeholder expectations, political or economic trends. These changes happen to, or despite, people and organizations. However, it’s also possible that these changes can come from an internal, organic motivation as well, a dedication to evolve for the sake of disrupting the status quo and servicing the values that drive one’s purpose and ambition.
Values-led people and organizations will form a culture of compliance with the strongest incentives for ethical decision-making and a prevailing emphasis on integrity, purpose, and inner success. Taken together with a strong controls framework to incorporate rules-based compliance foundations, an emphasis on values will give credibility and authenticity to corporate governance and strategy.
Starbucks is one of the most recognizable global retail brands today. Its branding is universally known, with its ubiquitous green and white mermaid logo reliably present worldwide and its slate of coffee and tea products also dependably the same. While many consumers may find consistent branding and the resulting quality standards to be expected along with it comforting, one of the undeniable criticisms of globalization has been that localization – native customs and characteristics that often have deep historic and cultural significance – can end up subverted in favor of international sameness.
Indeed, companies such as Starbucks have struggled in some markets to import their menus and store designs to communities which may be resistant to connecting with what can be seen as a generic, foreign experience. Apart from just lacking appeal or seeming strange, sometimes these companies can offend local norms or fail to fit into the communities which they wish to court for business. While sometimes novelty of a brand can create allure or even cult status for the company’s products with curious consumers, more often, Imposing a company and its products on a community in a non-assimilative way does not likely make for a successful competitive strategy.
Starbucks has faced its challenges importing its distinctive coffee shop brand and products to new communities over the years. Even within the United States, local coffee houses with loyal customer bases have put up resistance to a major corporate brand setting up shop in communities such as Venice Beach, California which have preferred small, local businesses to fit with an indie, alternative vibe. Outside of the United States, the powerful social value of “coffee culture,” representing a social and community activity rather than just a caffeine and snack break, has sometimes not jived well with perceptions of the Starbucks brand. Criticisms of the products themselves come from people who have high expectations for bespoke coffee that they don’t feel Starbucks satisfies or, on the other end, a standard idea that coffee is quick, cheap, and on-the-go only, in light of which Starbucks seems expensive and inconvenient.
One striking way that Starbucks can address these objections is to seek to fit within and contribute to the community authentically and meaningfully. In Kyoto, Japan, the Starbucks Coffee Kyoto Ninenzaka Yasaka Tea Parlor is an amazing example of how a company can demonstrate respect towards a community and its traditions in the design of its public spaces. This Starbucks is located in a traditional wooden house, with subdued colors and branding on its exterior, which fits aesthetically and culturally in the historic neighborhood where it is located. On the inside, the authenticity of the retail experience to its cultural environment continues, with tatami (straw) matting on the floors and traditional Japanese garden in the back courtyard by the coffee bar. Rather than appearing in contrast to the other businesses in its area, this Starbucks blends powerfully into its distinctive surroundings. Starbucks does not seem here like it is trying to impose its brand or style, but rather to show respect for the traditions of the very historic Gion district of Kyoto.
Joining the community in which the store is located, rather than setting itself apart from it, is a powerful expression of social responsibility and engagement for a brand to make as it seeks to attract and appeal to customers. Matching with the experience and aesthetic of such a distinctive area as Gion, which was originally developed as a district in the Middle Ages and is one of the most well-known geisha districts in Japan with the Yakasha Shrine at its center, is a challenging but inspiring business strategy. This values-based approach to growth and design leads to sustainable expansion and competition for a brand such as Starbucks, which can benefit tremendously from positioning itself as sensitive and loyal to local communities and their characters.
For more on this interesting Starbucks outlet as well as Starbucks locations in other countries that aim to honor their communities with their design aesthetic, check out this CNN feature article.
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GRC for compliance professionals
Compliance as a function is sometimes subject to varying definitions. Across different companies, industries, and cultures, organizational perspectives on the purpose and scope of a compliance program can vary. Some see compliance as an alternative to or close relation of the legal department, while others position it much more independently, perhaps as an intermediary between the business lines and audit. Still others may see compliance as the depository for risk-based support activities that do not otherwise fall cleanly into any other established unit.
As previously discussed on this blog, and as this blog will continue to ensure to express, the autonomy and visibility of compliance is integral to the integrity and sustainability of an organization’s employees and business strategy. Compliance blends a rules-based approach with a values-based approach to reconcile ethical expectations with legal obligations and technical requirements.
Professionals who work with interpreting legal and regulatory guidance and implementing these into business practices will likely recognize the acronym “GRC.” GRC stands for governance, risk management, and compliance. This umbrella term integrates these functions to describe the operational activities undertaken by an organization to execute plans, manage risk, and encourage integrity.
The GRC model refers to process themes, not necessarily functional units of an organization. Indeed, the three themes of GRC may be included in operational tasks and across numerous independent departments, including HR, finance, IT, audit, and at the board level, in addition to the obvious areas such as risk, legal, and compliance.
GRC can be seen as a discipline that seeks to coordinate the flow of information and ownership of risk so that the activities and processes it encompasses are effectively and efficiently incorporated. As organizations become bigger, this discipline becomes all the more important for keeping channels of communication open and clear, both up and down silos as well as across business areas.
Ethical decision-making thrives in an integrated system where objectives are clearly expressed and information-sharing is transparent and relied-upon. Elevating a coordinated GRC discipline can foster a communication regimen in an organization where reasonableness and feedback rather than heuristics and routine dominate. Equity and integrity can thrive if actions are taken openly and cooperatively rather than in isolation.
In the ever-changing regulatory landscape of modern business, it is so important that an organization’s GRC activities be coordinated so that work is not duplicated or wasted and gaps are filled rather than passed over with tunnel vision. These functions share stakeholders and objectives, and therefore should share information to maximize meaningful impact and minimize redundant effort.
The basic concepts of the GRC approach are all useful for a compliance officer or other professional to consider:
- Governance: This refers to the management control framework used by an organization’s senior leadership, relying on management information from across the organization in order to direct and control the overall strategy and operation of an organization. This concerns major existential questions for the organization, such as – what are the roles of leaders at all levels? What are the reporting mechanisms and what checks and balances exist for these? How does business strategy translate into directions to various business units and how are these instructions communicated to employees? Having an informed perspective on the organization’s governance objectives is very important for a compliance officer because this gives insight to the tone at the top and the mechanism through which these critical values become concrete practices.
- Risk management: Risk management is the identification, assessment, and response to risk factors which may have an impact on an organization’s activities. This also includes considering risks which do not have an impact and ascertaining that this evaluation remains correct and current as fluid business objectives and conditions may change. All organizations are subject to some risks, such as operational risk, technological risk, and financial risk, while others may be determined by the industry in which they operate, such as market risk, liquidity risk, political risk, third-party risk, and product-specific risks. Risk management entails planning and implementing controls in order to address these risks, either by mitigating them, changing strategy or practice to eliminate them, accepting them, or transferring them to a service provider or partner who is positioned to best respond to them. Legal, legislative, and regulatory risks are of particular interest to compliance officers, as are compliance-centric risks such as reputational risk. Compliance officers should take risk identification and assessment well into account when planning compliance program objectives so that these can be fine-tuned to the emergent and most important needs the business faces in this area.
- Compliance: Of course, staying in good standing with supervisory authorities and ensuring that business practices and procedures meet standards and requirements set by external laws and regulations as well as internal policies and procedures, ensures that the work done in governance and risk management activities is properly directed and sufficiently supported. An on-going assessment and prioritization of the compliance program’s effectiveness and appropriateness is necessary to ensure that the controls in place are up-to-date and working as intended.
The themes above are all germane to the objectives of a compliance program and can be referred to in seeking buy-in from senior management or supervisory board members, with whom ultimate responsibility for establishing and executing these systemic processes rests.
Instagram is a very popular social media app based on sharing photos and videos, publicly and to selected users as well as via direct, private message. It was launched in 2010 and since April 2012 has been owned by Facebook, another giant in the social media industry. In less than the decade of its existence, Instagram has grown a very large and active community, where users can interact with their friends and “followers” as well as other communities who maintain a presence there, public figures, media sources, and corporate brands.
All of these wildly different groups, from all over the world, sharing content and commentary on one platform, is exciting and promises many opportunities for collaboration. Along with these positive connections, though, of course come negative surprises and possibilities for challenges and abuses. With all the influence Instagram has through its popularity comes also responsibility for defining the standards and limitations of the community as well as what it will put out into the internet and the world.
Instagram has faced its share of criticism for its efforts to implement and maintain effective controls and reporting mechanisms. Instagram relies heavily on user reporting of inappropriate content, such as posts depicting illegal activity or the use of “coded” hashtags and emojis to conceal but continue on with such practices. Understandably, even the most aggressive attempts to keep up with the pace of this behavior on social media will fall behind quickly, leading to criticism the community is unsafe. When Instagram is too proactive or reaches in deleting comments, posts, or users, however, then controversy about overreaching into privacy and expression begins in response.
Kevin Systrom, one of the original creators of Instagram and its current CEO, wants to work this balance between protection from abuse and freedom of expression. Under his leadership, Instagram is dedicated to ensuring that the content and tone on the platform is compliant with its community guidelines. Changes to the comments sections on photos – including allowing users to filter out comments that had certain words, or to post photos without comment sections available – are intended to encourage safer self-expression by the posters who might otherwise fear harassment or offensive content in response below their photos.
Platforms such as Instagram, of course, can never be neutral – any technology’s relationship with its user is one that is fraught with moral concerns, starting right at the ethics of its design, which is made only more complex by algorithms, robot users, and the real users who make their own decisions about the content to share and promote that run the gamut from universally appropriate to offensive, harassing, or even illegal. In such a context, applying a code of ethics is a very hard task, but perhaps it is the inherent difficulty of doing this that makes it so important to try.
Creating filters and tools to hide and promote, prevent and engage, either when deployed by the community management behind the scenes or when elected by users, is just the beginning of the design choices engineers have made at Instagram to implement technical responses to problematic tone in some corners of the platform. Instagram tries to deploy artificial intelligence to help also, to sort real posts from fake and to learn from the data to understand why innocent comments or content may be abusive to the context, a concept called word embeddings. AI has its limitations, of course, but in any rules-based approach to governance it’s necessary to start with something good and then make continual efforts to make it better, rather than leave risks un-addressed while in hopeful pursuit of the best.
Time will tell how effective Instagram’s efforts to make the platform a safer place for expression really are, and what they really accomplish – a place which is open for creative sharing and communication creation, but not to toxicity and abuse, or a censored, sanitized, disingenuous photo collection where self-expression is restricted and speech censored? Perhaps Instagram will succeed in going against the tide on the internet and in much of life, where the level of social discourse seems to have gone low, tinged by anger and dark with people’s worst impulses, and make a place where the conversation can be a bit more civil, even if it has to be filtered first to get there.
For more detail on Kevin Systrom’s ambition of making Instagram a safe haven and role model platform on the internet, and the challenges that both motivate and complicate this mission, see Nicholas Thompson’s story on Wired.
One of the undeniable effects of the trends of globalization and increased demand for customization and specialization that have occurred in both the retail and service industries is that competition is keener than ever. In today’s crowded marketplace, organizations must get creative to set themselves apart and appeal to consumers. From a compliance perspective, of course, the most practical and sustainable way for an organization to do this is to be loud and proud about its integrity and values-based approach to business.
TravelBird, an Amsterdam-based travel agency which operates in 11 European markets, has embraced a disruptive business model and is determined about changing the way customers plan and book their vacations into a holistic experience. Founded in 2010, TravelBird refers to itself as a “scale-up,” a start-up with a strategy of cultivated and plotted growth. Its customer service ambitions are matched by its desire to create a vibrant employee experience and to have a corporate profile which is inspiring and consistent with the image it wishes to project publicly.
Towards accomplishing this goal, TravelBird has recently announced its “cultural values,” a novel spin on the corporate mission statement or business principles. These values as stated by the company are strikingly balanced and represent a thoughtful evaluation of the organizational and employee traits which embody the best alignment with a successful, sustainable business philosophy:
- Adventurous but Responsible – Take measured business risks, even as leaps of faith, and go boldly into new product and service areas as the customer experience may demand the organization to do so. However, do this with respect for foundations such as legal and regulatory frameworks and the ethical and moral considerations that may be implied. This is the ultimate principle of sustainability that emerging enterprises, especially companies with a basis in technology, forget to make room for in their organizations. An organization which approaches its growth with this orientation is culturally better prepared to offensively weather future storms than one that defensively considers problems for the first time as they occurring.
- Passionate but Practical – Creative and sales may drive the bottom-line survival, but compliance and other control functions inform the staying power. Design strategic choices and decision-making at the company so that it is consistent with an ambitious business profile and speaks to the passions and excitements of the employees and customers, but don’t forget to do things right from the start.
- Candid but Compassionate – Honesty is the best policy, but it doesn’t have to be brutal or at the expense of a mature relationship-based way of doing business. Commercial relationships can be very remote and it’s easy to forget there are people on both sides of every interaction. It is important to treat each other with integrity but to also have a high standard for performance and behavior.
Customers and employees alike are highly motivated by companies that model admirable cultural conduct. Blending corporate ambition and conscience, strategy and cultural responsibility, is a powerful approach to growing and cultivating a business. Companies looking to develop directed corporate cultures should aspire to lead with this kind of message and engage in these values authentically and continually.
For TravelBird’s announcement on their cultural values: check out their LinkedIn.
The famous outdoor industry retailer Patagonia has a bold and defining mission statement: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” In this, a company which makes its profits off selling products to people who wish to explore and enjoy the outdoors has linked its strategy, growth, and indeed reason for existing, to respecting and protecting that environment. Patagonia’s reputation has been cultivated in the public eye to carefully coincide with this intention.
In recent times, however, Patagonia has grown much more quickly than its previously modest expectations, pursuing revenues wherever consumer demand takes the company and stepping up their competition. This has been driven largely by the fact that consumers who have an affinity for the environment and its protection also, logically, are interested in driving their spending power toward companies that they feel share this value. Millennial customers are highly motivated by companies which model social, cultural, and, especially relevant in the case of Patagonia, environmental values. With the vast array of consumer choices that the retail industry offers, both in products and in outlets to purchase these products, cheapest price or easiest availability is no longer the only or the loudest driver of buying power.
Patagonia has hereby achieved the special mix of corporate ambition and conscience. The company is not just an outdoors products retailer, though it still may be thought of as that by many. Instead, it has grown into a green venture capital fund, a food producer, book and film publisher, and a political activism organization that is willing to take on the US government on environmental protection and conservation causes.
Being a company that believes in something, and being rewarded with consumer loyalty, interest, and purchasing power for it, is a powerful message for compliance programs. Creating a serious, genuine corporate image based on values and then selling that image to customers as much as any other product is a huge ambition and a dynamic identity for the organization. Companies must develop corporate cultures which drive what they do with a specificity beyond pursuing sales and dominating product markets. They must recruit leaders who embody this, reinforce this honestly with their employees, and offer integrity in this message to the consumers who will trust them with their loyalty in return.
Hereby, companies such as Patagonia can become not only revenue leaders in their industries but also corporate role models to their peers and competitors. While seeking to directly motivate positive change at the publicly traded titans of industry may be biting off too much to chew, organizations can grow themselves strategically so that their own corporate impact is bigger and better.
In Patagonia’s case, relying on direct-to-consumer business via their own stores and website means that they can take their growth and values ambitions directly to their customers and feed-forward based upon the reception they receive. This is a powerful engagement opportunity for a brand and building a political and social consciousness that is informed by it means that the company can shape itself into the type of organization its customers admire and with which they want to be associated. While Patagonia cannot force political action or change at the highest level on its own, as a company it can be forward-looking and progressive in a time when its consumers appreciate and desire these values. Hopefully, Patagonia can also be an example to other companies to raise the competitive standard for corporate cultures and relevant, genuine social responsibility as a core business value. If that is effectively accomplished, then productive change for the collective can be well within reach.
For more about the power of Patagonia’s corporate social conscious, check out Abe Streep’s story on Outside Online.