Instead Of Worrying Just About Legality, Execs Must Think More About Ethics
The Hewlett-Packard boardroom scandal is beginning to claim so many casualties I'm thinking about printing up a scorecard to help all of us keep tabs on who is in and who is out. But more importantly, this developing story prompts you to ask why we don't see more independence and integrity in the workplace these days.
This industry was built on independence, something that is all but gone now. We used to have lots of independent entrepreneurial thinkers who wanted to do things differently. This spawned thousands of start-up companies, many of which are now the titans of the high-tech industry.
But that independence is gone, and the vast majority of the high-tech industry isn't managed or driven by independent thinkers. Instead, it is led by professional managers.
Integrity is something that I personally have associated with HP more than any other company in high tech. What is disappointing in this entire scandal is that the only question anyone seemed to ask was, "Is it legal?" No one apparently asked, "Is it ethical?"
Ethics are a hard thing to define. The practice of attaching tracking software to e-mail is one I can assure you is used every minute of every day throughout the business world. It's not only used by private investigators, it's used by headhunters and e-mail marketers, as well.
The issue is if you're inclined not to care about the ethics of using technology in a questionable manner, then you may be inclined to justify it by determining that the practice is legal and disregard the ethical question based on that.
There are so many unethical practices in business it's impossible to name them all, but here is one minor one that I'm sure Apple justifies by saying it's legal and drives more business.
It's a fact that you can buy a gift card for iTunes downloads. The dirty little ethical issue is that the gift cards are sold in whole-dollar increments, while the music is not sold that way. A 15-song download purchase at 99 cents per song costs $14.85. If you have a $15 gift card, there is not enough on the card to buy the sixteenth song. So what is the gift-card holder to do? Clearly, either leave money in Apple's pocket or reload the gift card to buy more if you don't want to walk away from your money. It's a small ethical issue, for sure, but to me, it's one nonetheless. Especially when you take into account the fact that Apple publicly positions its integrity as so strong that it has taken numerous steps to legally prevent copyright infringement of music. Yet, it's OK to set up a gift-card system that never lets the customer spend all the money on the card.
You see my point surrounding an inclination to justify practices based on them being legal while disregarding whether they are ethical? The fact is, others would say Apple's gift-card structure is smart marketing. I say it is unethical marketing.
The HP scandal may be top of mind right now, but there are a lot of other things going on. At some point, the politicians will see an opportunity to pounce on this purely for political reasons, and high tech will be faced with more and more regulatory issues as a result.
The fact is if more people don't start watching things like independence, integrity and their inclination to act ethically, then they will be hearing more words like interrogate, investigate, incarcerate, inquest and inmate. It's all about which way you're inclined to lean.
Make something happen. I can be reached at (781) 839-1202 or via e-mail at [email protected].