Category Archives: Ethics

If You’re Looking for an Edge in Business, Try Trust

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In this blog, we regularly look at the trends as they are being covered in business books. One topic that has gained momentum in recent years is Trust. Among the authors that have tackled this subject are Stephen M.R. Covey with The Speed of Trust and Smart Trust, Jordan Lewis with Trusted Partners, Rohit Barghava with Likeonomics, Robert Hurley with The Decision to Trust, and the list goes on.

David Horsager is another author to tackle this topic with his book The Trust Edge. He makes the statement “The single uniqueness of the greatest leaders and organizations of all time is Trust.” And, “Trust has the ability to accelerate or destroy any business, organization, or relationship. With greater trust comes greater innovation, stronger brands, increased retention of good people, higher morale, multiplied productivity, better results, and a bigger bottom line.”

What all these authors agree on is that trust is very important in business … in fact it may the single most important characteristic of a strong business or leader.

Horsager provides what he calls the 8 pillars of trust, to help organizations and their leaders build trust:

1. Clarity: People trust the clear and mistrust the ambiguous.

2. Compassion: People put faith in those who care beyond themselves.

3. Character: People notice those who do what is right over what is easy.

4. Competency: People have confidence in those who stay fresh, relevant, and capable.

5. Commitment: People believe in those who stand through adversity.

6. Connection: People want to follow, buy from, and be around friends.

7. Contribution: People immediately respond to results.

8. Consistency: People love to see the little things done consistently.

To help you build trust in your organization and career, we’ve invited David Horsager to join us for our Soundview Live webinar How to Build Trust in Your Organization, coming up on February 13th. Horsager will shed further light on the 8 pillars, and provide examples of real-world companies that have made trust the center of their organizations.

Soundview subscribers attend all Soundview Live webinars for free, and others pay just $59 and can fill a conference room with colleagues and ask questions of Horsager during the event.

Last Minute Executive Gift Ideas

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As if we weren’t already challenged enough by coming up with holiday gifts for friends and family, many business people also need to come up with gift ideas for colleagues, employees and clients. The challenge with this task is that they must be in good taste, not too personal, and below that price which is considered inappropriate.

A quick search on gift.com gave me some excellent ideas such as The 5th Avenue Wine Gift Basket, the Omaha Steaks Meat Lover Delights and a Personalized Leather Portfolio. But what if you want to give a gift that says you care about their business and career?

That’s where Soundview comes in. Each year we make it easy for our subscribers to give something that they have tried themselves and therefore are assured of its value – Soundview Executive Book Summaries. They can choose from our Standard Online Edition, our Premium Edition, or our Premium Audio Edition. And because we offer this as a buy-one-get-one-free, the subscriptions end up at 50% off, making it an economical choice for colleagues and clients alike.

If you’re not a current subscriber, you can buy a subscription for yourself, and get them for friends as well, saving all the way around. Make your life simpler. Go on over to our gift page and take care of that last-minute shopping today.

Put Power in Your Values

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THE 3 POWER VALUES

PUT POWER IN YOUR VALUES

Johnson & Johnson was once revered as the epitome of a company whose core values had overcome a devastating setback that might have sunk a lesser company. When an unknown assailant poisoned random boxes of Extra Strength Tylenol in 1982, the company’s transparent response became the gold standard of crisis management. By 2011, according to David Gebler, author of The 3 Power Values, Johnson & Johnson had a new and unfortunate identity as a company whose quality was so poor that it had issued a dozen recalls in the last two years alone. It had even been caught in a “phantom recall” — hiring people to surreptitiously take boxes off the shelves so that it could avoid issuing another recall. What happened to the values of the company? Were the executives in 2011 so different from those in 1982?

Roadblocks to Ethical Performance

According to Gebler, while the company had undergone a number of structural and ownership changes since 1982, the core issue was that the company had lost its grip on its culture of ethics and values. This is a common problem, he writes. Executives can be baffled when employees and managers act in ways that are clearly contrary to the culture of the company — or at least what those executives believe to be the culture of the company. In truth, writes Gebler, companies themselves often put up the roadblocks that prevent employees, managers and even executives from behaving the way they should.

The problem is a work environment or culture that pushes employees and managers to unethical or potentially damaging behavior, Gebler writes. A single-minded focus on reducing costs or forcing people to do too much with too little, for example, can cause employees to take dangerous shortcuts. The stated values of a company mean little if the culture is not aligned with those values.

Enabling Values

To prevent a company’s own culture from sabotaging the values and ethics of that company and its people, Gebler advocates the use of three “power” values that, “can influence specific behaviors that will have a positive influence on an organization’s culture.” These behaviors, he continues, “will push and nudge the organization’s goals, principles and standards into alignment.”

Gebler’s three power values are: Integrity, Commitment and Transparency. His use of the word “power” is not related to the amount of power one acquires through these values, but because they are values that enable the alignment described above.

Integrity, he explains, links an organization’s goals (what it says it will do) to its standards (what it actually does). Integrity is built on two dimensions: fairness and consistency on the one hand, and accountability and responsibility on the other.

The second power value, Commitment, links an organization’s principles and its goals, which is often not the case. The organization may have a certain set of principles, but the constraints and requirements of its goals force people to abandon those principles. Finally, Transparency links standards and principles.

The 3 Power Values is filled with real-life examples that reinforce its important lessons. Any manager or executive facing unethical or destructive behavior in the company should look at the corporate culture first before assigning blame.

Check out our full database of business book reviews on the Soundview website.

Lance Armstrong and Credibility

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On Friday, Lance Armstrong was stripped of seven Tour de France titles from 1999 to 2005 on doping charges. The USADA made this decision after reviewing test samples from those years, along with testimony from 10 eye witnesses. Although Travis Tygart, head of the USADA, said that Armstrong might have held on to most of his titles had he cooperated with the investigation, Armstrong declined to do so.

This development is just the final step in many years of accusations and investigations by various officials, and came as no surprise to many. Armstrong has had a checkered past when it comes to his decisions – taking on hero status for his titles and fight with cancer, while at the same time leaving a bad taste for many with the divorce of his strongly supportive wife and the constant doping accusations.

Lance Armstrong is a brand and a company, so what basic principles of business might he look to for guidance? In looking through our extensive library of book summaries, I found Credibility by James Kouzes and Barry Posner. In this book the authors surveyed more than 1,500 managers and 1,000 federal government executives, and from that survey analyzed the key factors that are crucial for good leaders. Here are the four crucial attributes from that analysis:

  1. Honest (truthful, has integrity, has character, is trusting)
  2. Forward-looking (visionary, foresighted, concerned about the future, has a sense of direction)
  3. Inspiring (uplifting, enthusiastic, energetic, humorous, cheerful, optimistic, positive about the future)
  4. Competent (capable, proficient, effective, gets job done, professional)

Kouzes and Posner make the case that credibility makes a real difference in the success of a company. “When people work with leaders they admire and respect, they feel better about themselves.” Quantitative data supports this fact.

The reverse is also true. When people perceive their leaders to have low credibility they are less likely to feel good about themselves, and have lower levels of attachment, engagement and ownership.

In the case of Lance Armstrong, Tygart may have put it best. “The agency would’ve reduced Armstrong’s punishment ‘if he would have been truthful and willing to meet to help the sport move forward for the good,’ Tygart says. ‘Of course, this is still possible and we always remain open, because while the truth hurts, ultimately, from what we have seen in these types of cases, acknowledging the truth is the best way forward.’” Perhaps there is a way forward for Armstrong, to regain his credibility.

*Other books on this subject include What Matters Now by Gary Hamel and Derailed by Tim Irwin.

How Does Your Company Rate?

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Although we’re seeing some slight improvements in our economy in recent weeks, we still have a long way to go to a full recovery. However, some are looking beyond the present crisis and see signs of a strong economy in the future – that is for those that make the grade.

In Good Company, Laurie Bassi and her co-authors make the case that to succeed in the future a company will need to meet the criteria for what they call a “good company.” They have developed a rating system (The Good Company Index) which takes into account certain criteria that are becoming essential in the new economy.

  1. Good Employer – they use a starting number based on ratings from Glassdoor.com and the Fortune list of 100 best companies.
  2. Good Seller – they use the consumer ratings of wRatings regarding quality, fair price and trust.
  3. Good Steward – they based this on statistics regarding a company’s record on the environment, penalties/fines, restraint in executive compensation and contribution to society/community.

As they state in their book, “A good company is one that starts with good intentions and then puts those into practice concretely through its actions in these three areas. Is your company good or moving toward good?

If you think that your company may not rate well and would like to move it up the charts, join Laurie Bassi and co-author Ed Frauenheim for our Soundview Live webinar Business Success in the Worthiness Era coming up on March 1st.