Integrity for sale

 Approximate reading time: 2 minutes

'How is your ethical compass?' is always worth asking in business.  The trouble is, ethics seems such a moveable feast that some people really are bereft of a compass that tells them when they are going off course.

Recently the Guardian described UK PR firms as fairly dodgy enterprises, earning large sums from burnishing the image of countries and governments that amount to “reputation laundering.”

What is interesting is the response from Neil Gibbons editor of Communicate magazine, which in this context must be regarded as akin to a spokesman for the PR industry. In the Guardian of 6th August he writes a hurt response to the feature but ends up showing just what happens when people lose their integrity compass.

Gibbons says that if we want to see democracy in developing nations we need to help them re-position themselves. But nowhere does he acknowledge that his industry has any moral obligations, any integrity boundaries, any sense that some PR contracts, profitable though they might be, are just plain wrong.

To make his point that all is fair in love and war, he argues, surely with tongue in cheek, that PR firms are no different to lawyers defending known criminals—“yet no one would suggest that it’s unethical to provide legal representation.”

To sum up, this means that every dictator, no matter his track record in human abuse and creation of terror is still entitled to some good old PR support. Well maybe if you are in PR you don’t see anything wrong with that, but the rest of us would surely feel fairly queasy about such feeble moral boundaries.

Pursuing ethics in business remains fraught with dilemmas, which is why developing an integrity compass, is so sensible. The sixth point of Google’s 10 point philosophy is that “You can make money without doing evil”. But even Google had trouble with this in China and was challenged to stick to it by its many supporters.

Meanwhile " I realized there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP and which have guided me throughout my career," is how Mark Hurd, CEO of HP recently explained as he was preciptously forced to resign from the company recently.

Hurd's departure is the third in five years at HP's top echelon. His immediate predecessor Patricia Dunn was fired in 2006 amid a boardroom spying scandal that involved spying on reporters' and directors' phone records to suss out the source of leaks to the media. "It says they're off track in some fundamental way," said Stephen Diamond, associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and an expert on business law.

Interestingly at one of the annual Maynard Leigh company retreats some of the team were asked to consider a moral dilemma. As experts in presentation and communication, imagine they had been approached by the British National Party and offered a contract worth over £150,000 to help them improve their presentation skills.

To add to the anguish which this dilemma posed, the group was told to imagine that the value of the contract could save the company from going out of business. What would the group do?

Amongst the arguments to surface was one similar to Gibbons’, namely that this was in fact a golden opportunity to educate and even help reform the BMP. The case was made that someone else would do it if we did not.

I admit to a thrill of pride at the eventual outcome of the discussion. After looking the moral and commercial dilemma in the face the group unprompted unanimously arrived at the decision to reject the BNP offer, even if it meant our business folded and we had to start again in a garage.

See also: How Good Is Your Integrity Compass

www.maynardleigh.co.uk