Published CommPro.biz 2014.01.28

Surprise Surprise

The Great Place to Work® Institute has been creating Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Places to Work list for nearly twenty years. The new list is just out and it’s interesting to note that the 100 companies that make the list share another trait: they make more money than most other companies. Having happy, engaged workers propelled these 100 companies into a growth rate close to five times that of businesses in general over the last two years. Those are the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. The companies that make their revenue figures public jumped more than 20% in the last two years. 

That may come as a surprise to some; it’s no surprise to us. Happy workers are those who are treated better than their peers in similar jobs. Workers who feel valued are more productive. They stay in their jobs long term. Cut turnover and you build an experienced workforce. It’s a pillar of the ethical business model that marks the firms that stand out even further, firms focused on all the stakeholders that can make or break a company. 

Firms focused on their workers, their customers, their vendors, their community, and on the environment, generate the profits to keep their lenders and investors happy. In their 2007 book, Firms of Endearment, the authors identified a group of companies that met those standards. They earned eight times the S&P Average over the ten years leading up to the research. The levels of growth and revenues gained by the Fortune 100 Best Places companies is impressive, but not close to the earnings of those that made the Firms of Endearment list. It’s no coincidence that companies demonstrating good behavior make more money than their peers. 

However, the ethical business model is not a guarantee. You can treat your workers well, you can follow to the letter the ethical business model and still fail. Any successful enterprise has to have a bit of luck in addition to a lot of hard work and doing the right thing. What we can guarantee is that all things being equal, you are more likely to succeed or to succeed on a larger scale than those who follow a less savory business approach. It’s too bad the bad guys make all the headlines. It’s too bad that sometimes the minority -those bad guys- are seen as the norm.

So it’s no surprise that firms on Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Places to Work list are doing well. As it happens so are most all of the companies on all the lists that document some aspect of good behavior. Surprising to us are the companies that continue to follow the low road in business. While they are a minority, they still are a massive cancer on our economy. Here’s a surprise for those greed centered Wall Street Bankers and corporate executives. They would do better by doing the right thing for all their stakeholders. 

"Am I wrong?"--"Am I crazy?"

"What do you think?"--"Do you agree?"

Published 2013.10.24 CommPRO.biz

Shareholders Come Last!

Corporate America, particularly the Monster Too-Big-To-Fail Banks, have it all backwards. A crazy concept, Shareholder Value, conceived as a business strategy in the late 1980s by college professor Dr. Alfred Rappaport, continues to ravage our economy even though it has been thoroughly discredited. One of its early advocates, Jack Welch, sang its praises back then when he was CEO of General Electric. He touted shareholder value for all to hear. Twenty years later in 2009 Welch turned around and said in a newspaper interview, “Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy; your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products".

Welch isn’t the only one to see the light. Jim Collins of Good to Great fame has been pointing to what makes great companies and the importance of long-term strategies rather than the quarter-to-quarter madness obsessing our corporate world today. It is especially dangerous in the case of the Monster Too-Big-To-Fail banks. Striving for short term goals, empowered by immunity from gambling laws, FDIC protected depositors, seemingly unlimited interest-free money from the FED, and the knowledge that there’s a taxpayer bailout waiting if they go too far, leads them to take wildly reckless chances. And the Monster Banks are doing just that, they are going too far.

Back in the real world where corporations are coming to the new Jack Welch, Jim Collins view, they understand that sky-high executive compensation encourages greed, not leadership. Measure after measure shows a different parameter on the road to success. Perhaps most dramatic is the work of two Professors Rajendra Sisodia and Jagdish Sheth. They set out looking for companies that met a list of standards that at first glance seem out of reach, companies that focused on their customers, their employees, their vendors, their communities, the environment and finally last in line, their shareholders; companies striving to serve all their stakeholders. They call them “Firms of Endearment.”

The professors partnered with writer David Wolfe who suggested that before they got too excited when they actually found more than two dozen such companies, that they had better check to see if any of these companies made any money. You know, the “result” where Jack Welch pointed out that shareholder value comes into play. To everyone’s surprise the public companies that made the Firms of Endearment list returned eight times the S&P average over the ten years prior to the list compilation.

Clearly this shows beyond any doubt that all things being equal, the Firms of Endearment high road is far superior even to the taxpayer supported route the Monster Banks inflict on our society. The whole idea that if you take care of the basic stakeholders, your bottom line will take care of itself is lost on these folks. David Wolfe wrote a great book, Firms of Endearment, that details the high road research and results. If you are holding your breath waiting for the Monster Bank CEOs to read it, forget it.

Published in CommPRO.BIZ 2013.05.22

Reputation, Reputation, Reputation

A disconnect between public perception and reality when it comes to ethics in business is perhaps the most costly economic factor in America. Companies that follow the highest ethical standards make way more money than those following any other model. Communication professionals are –or should be– guarding the most valuable asset in any business, reputation, the fountainhead of profits.

Surprise! Ethics has always been the road to profits. Reputation Rocks! The ethical business model and the United States share came to be in the same era. The late 1700s were a very trying time for the Brits. They were tied up in nasty military conflicts with France, Spain, the Dutch, and Colonial America. The Industrial Revolution was turning society inside out, snatching work and workers from a home-based production model to machine dominated mass production concepts. Great for a new class of factory owners, not so much for those whose living space was dominated by a spinning wheel and a loom worked to the point of exhaustion to eek out a livelihood.

The lucky ones found work at the “Mill,” jobs that look pretty bleak, and were very bleak. Long hours in windowless buildings (windows were taxed), breathing foul air filled with fabric particles, enduring unending, unbearable noise levels, all the while facing the risk to life-and-limb the clattering machines presented. By 1800 the misery of home-based labor had given way to the despair of the mill and the tenement. Bad as this picture was, strangely it was a tad better than the brain and body numbing efforts of the home-based model it replaced.

However, the ethical business model was growing on the fly. Late in the 1700s a ten-year-old lad, Robert Owen, set off to make his fortune in London. He became a commission salesman at a men’s clothing establishment.  By the time he was eighteen Owen had saved £100, a small fortune in that day. Enough to go into business for himself turning raw cotton into cloth; within a year he tripled his fortune.

At nineteen he made the acquaintance of a large mill owner with a Dickensesque name, Peter Drinkwater.  Drinkwater purchased Robert Owen’s equipment and goods and hired him at £300 a year to manage his mill.  For six weeks Robert changed nothing, he just walked about the mill and got to know the employees. Once he felt he knew what was needed, he began to act.

Owen improved working conditions, visited the workers in their homes offering help and advice.  He set up schools for them and for their children. The first year he quadrupled Drinkwater’s profit.  When the owner came up to his Manchester mill from London to see what this young genius had done, he found his mill clean and tidy, his workers happy and productive.  He gave Owen a £100 bonus and a new contract with a percentage of the profits built in.

Now in his early twenties, Robert Owen kept improving the lot of his workers and Drinkwater’s profits kept soaring.  He added windows and ventilation to the mill. He refused to hire very young children. Not only was the mill well run and extraordinarily profitable, the quality of the goods was the finest in the land. When Drinkwater wanted to buy out his contract, he happily agreed. At twenty-seven Robert Owen had become a “brand.”

On a visit to Scotland, he met the charming daughter of a mill owner and bought her father out for £60,000. Now with a mill of his own and the love of his life at his side Owen was ready to show what the ethical business model could really do. He cut the workday from twelve to ten hours. He put in showers and provided healthy meals, often eating with his workers. He leveled the tenements and built comfortable cottages. He lived among his workers. He gave prizes for the most beautiful gardens grown from flower seeds he provided.

Owen built a combination nursery, kindergarten, and school. It ran day and night caring for the small children of his workers, teaching older children and anyone else who wanted to learn. Teachers could not strike the children; Owen explained that it only taught them violence. He poured money into improving the lot of his workers. He believed that clean water, a sewage system, trees, flowers, and healthy employees were a benefit to everyone and to his bottom line.  A bottom line that made him very wealthy. Owen is just one of many who adopted an early ethical business model. Through the 1800s and into the 1900s this model became the hallmark of many great and highly profitable enterprises. 

Peter Cooper was born in New York City in 1791, the year Owen turned twenty. An extraordinary human being, Cooper’s serendipitous life melded his remarkable intellect and resourcefulness to turn both opportunities and disasters into useful and profitable enterprises. He continued to live a simple life even after he became the richest man in New York. His idol, Benjamin Franklin, died the year before Cooper was born. Like him, Franklin had only one year of formal education. And like Franklin, Cooper felt America’s future lay in education. He was determined to found an institution of higher learning for the poor.

In his sixties, Cooper began to build his school, The Cooper Union.  And to be sure he got the school he wanted, he maintained total control: his money, his plan, his school. He believed education should be “as free as the air we breathe.”  He offered night classes for adults. He encouraged both men and women to attend; devising special classes to be sure young women gained useful skills. His dream endures. Cooper Union continues to serve —as he put it— “the boys and girls of this city, who have had no better opportunity than I enjoyed.”

Peter Cooper was in his mid-forties when Jamie Oliver arrived in America from Scotland. His father had been content to scratch out a living tending another man’s sheep. His mother was determined to come to America.  They finally made it in 1836 and found themselves in Mishawaka, just outside South Bend, Indiana. That state was giving a farm, a rich piece of fertile earth, to anyone willing to live on it and work it. What a far cry from keeping someone else’s sheep in the rocky hills of Scotland.

Jamie loved farming every day of his life. He found it necessary, however, to work at almost any odd job he could find. Along the way he learned how to smelt iron, so when a fellow in South Bend wanted to sell his struggling foundry Jamie came up with $88 to buy it. The plant cast the one-horse plows farmers relied on to turn the soil. Jamie knew from backbreaking personal experience that the plows of the day could stand considerable improvement.  In 1870 he sold his first Oliver “Chilled” Plow – so named for a unique method of cooling white-hot metal as it was formed.  In just a few years his little foundry grew to a 30-acre complex, the

Oliver Chilled Plow Works, capable of producing a half-million plows a year. Jamie’s innovative design reduced by half the effort of both the horse and the man behind the plow.

Through it all Jamie never saw himself as a factory owner or a businessman. He saw himself as a farmer, solving farmers’ problems.  He saw his workers as vital to solving those problems and felt responsible for giving them comfortable lives so they could focus on that task. When financial woes struck the nation, Oliver kept his plant producing, storing the plows he couldn’t sell until better times came.  He never laid off workers and never reduced wages.

To put the importance of Oliver’s ideas in perspective, remember in his time, 60% of Americans lived on farms. He made the lives of the farmers easier and more productive. Jamie played a vital role in the largest sector of America’s economy.  Jamie Oliver considered himself a farmer, a friend of the farmer, a partner of the farmer, and a partner of nature. His success came while seeking to benefit his fellow men, the very essence of the ethical business model.

The Industrial Revolution was in high gear in the late 1800s and no place on earth illustrates the extremes it created more than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Nestled along the Monongahela River on one side of Pittsburgh were Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills. The gutsy little Scot built his enterprise on benevolent principles. But when he needed it most his resolve and moral fiber failed him.

The defining moment in Carnegie’s life came in 1892 at his Homestead Works. He was bent on nipping a tiny union movement in the bud. He saw it as elitist because membership was not open to the vast majority of his workers. A minor dispute spiraled into war. Carnegie locked out all of his workers and called in a private Pinkerton army. A battle ensued resulting in 16 deaths and over 20 seriously wounded, forever tarnishing Carnegie’s legacy.  All the libraries, a great university, and his other numerous charities will never erase this tragedy.

A lesson learned in Homestead was not lost on another Pittsburgh business man, Harry Heinz. He had started out packing horseradish in his parents’ basement. A talented promoter and salesman, he was forced into bankruptcy as a result of (as his competitors saw it) his out-of-touch-with-reality idea that preserving food intended for human beings should be done under sanitary conditions.  Heinz persisted, however, starting over again and even going back and paying off those who lost money when his earlier enterprise went under. He called those “moral debts.”

By 1892 –the year of the violent Homestead strike– Heinz was growing his food packing enterprise a few miles away on the north shore of the Allegheny River across from Pittsburgh. He hoped to create an atmosphere that would make violence unnecessary. His plant was to grow larger and larger in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and as it grew it became a model for enlightened employee working conditions. Like Owen, Cooper, Oliver, and others, Heinz was out of step with some of the conventional thinking of the day.

The H.J. Heinz plant that emerged as the century turned was unique in almost every way. It was bright and sparkling clean.  It preserved and packed a wide range of foods by natural processes under pristine conditions. Workers (mostly women) wore clean blue and white uniforms and were trained in high standards of personal cleanliness. Every employee was given a weekly manicure.

Heinz employees were offered a wide range of educational, recreational, and social opportunities.  A roof garden and reading room were provided for their use; a swimming pool, regular outings and picnics made it an ideal place to work.  Far ahead of its time and not bad even by today’s standards.  Sounds almost like life at the Googleplex.

The ethical business model was supported mostly by anecdotal evidence until two academics and a writer published Firms of Endearment that documented their groundbreaking business ethics research. They set out to find companies with the highest ethical standards. Companies that dealt with all their stakeholders on the highest ethical plane: their customers, their employees, their community, their vendors, and the environment. But how about their bottom line? How about their shareholders?

It turned out that over the ten years prior to the Firms of Endearment study, the public companies that met their ethical bar returned eight times the Standard & Poor’s average. Not eight times the worst, eight times the average return. That’s pretty impressive. It shows that if you take care of everything else your bottom line will take care of itself. It doesn’t mean it’s always easy to follow this path or that everyone who follows it will succeed. Unforeseeable factors such as market trends, economic downturns, competitive issues –even a natural disaster like Super Storm Sandy– come into play.

It takes smarts. It takes hard work. It takes courage to succeed. You have to be lucky and you have to follow the oldest of moral guides, the Golden Rule. That’s what ethics is really all about. Nor is it writ large that cutthroat bad guys don’t succeed. It just means that all things being equal, an ethical business model will dramatically outperform any alternative. Instinctively we know that; it’s why the vast majority of us are out there trying to do the right thing every day, enjoying the great feeling that comes from that effort win or lose.

In the end that’s what it’s all about, the satisfaction we gain from our endeavors. We want to be able to hold our heads up when we head out to work. We want to end the day fulfilled. We don’t want to spend our life looking over our shoulder. Just as nobody wants to do business with a crook, nobody wants to look back on their life and feel like a crook. Crooks can always justify their behavior, but deep down in the dead of the night they know who they are and what they are, they are crooks.

Originally published in CommPRO.biz

Business Ethics Is Not 

An Oxymoron

 

Every day all but a few of us go out into the world and try our best to do the right thing. That’s true in our personal life; that’s true in our workplace. Why then does it seem that all we hear about are the bad things? The Enrons, the Adelphias, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, bribes at Walmart, reckless bankers destroying the world economy. Given all that and more, how can we say “Business Ethics is not an Oxymoron?”

It has to do with what we human beings consider news. By and large we aren’t interested in the good stuff. Quiet day-to-day happenings occasionally make for an interesting feature story, but the front page headlines tend more toward mayhem, treachery, and such. We don’t go to the race track to see the drivers make left turns; we go to see the cars crash. We don’t head for the movies to see ordinary life. We don’t pick up novels about good folks doing well, but in real life good folks doing the right thing and doing well is actually the norm.

Several years ago two academics and a writer published Firms of Endearment documenting their research into business ethics. They set out to find companies that maintain the highest ethical standards. Companies that deal with all their stakeholders at the highest ethical levels: their customers, their employees, their vendors, their community, the environment and finally their bottom line, their lenders and shareholders. They found them, great examples, nice outfits to deal with and have around. However, the remaining question was, do they make any money?

It turns out that over the ten years prior to the Firms of Endearment study, the public companies that met their ethical bar returned eight times the Standard & Poor’s average. Not eight times the worst, eight times the average return. 

That’s pretty impressive. It shows that if you take care of everything else your bottom line will take care of itself. It doesn’t mean that it’s always easy to follow this path or that everyone who follows it will succeed. There are times when the right thing is not clear. Unforeseeable factors come into play, such as economic downturns, competitive issues, market trends; even a natural disaster like Super Storm Sandy can wipe out a thriving enterprise.

It takes smarts. It takes hard work. It takes courage to succeed. You have to be lucky and you have to follow the oldest of moral guides, the Golden Rule. That’s what ethics is really all about. Nor is it writ large that cutthroat bad guys won’t succeed. It just means that all things being equal, an ethical business model will dramatically outperform any alternative. Instinctively we know that; it’s why the vast majority of us are out there trying to do the right thing every day, enjoying the great feeling that comes from that effort win or lose.

Reputation Counts

Corporate Responsibility Magazine released its first corporate reputation study in advance of its annual Commit!Forum (2012.10.02>03) held at the opulent Wall Street venue, Cipriani. The CARAVAN® telephone survey of 1,032 adults in early September came up with some startling results; especially startling in view of the existing job market.

They found that among the unemployed in the study, 75% said they would rather keep looking than take a job with an organization with a bad reputation. Among those currently working, 58% would move to one of the bad guys for more money. How much more? On average they would hold their nose and change jobs if their pay were doubled. On the flip side, among the currently employed, 87% would take an offer from a company with an excellent reputation. More money? Yes, but not all that much, between 1% and 10% added to their paycheck.

“The results of the new survey underscore Americans’ desire to align themselves with organizations that do more for society than increase their bottom-line. Even during a time when Americans face many fiscal challenges, most people would rather continue their search for employment than work for a company that has questionable business practices or ethics,” Elliot Clark, the CEO of Corporate Responsibility Magazine, is quoted in a press release. “The survey demonstrates that there is a cost of bad business behavior, which significantly affects the ability to attract and retain people.”

Great people who stay with an organization are one of the markers not only of a nice place to work; they are makers of a profitable business. Businesses that care for their employees, their customers, their vendors, their community, and the environment get a much better shot at profitability than outfits that focus on the bottom line. The authors of Firms of Endearment found that companies that followed these markers racked up eight times the profits of the S&P 500 average over a ten-year period.

So those who would rather keep looking are wise. Better to keep looking until you find a decent organization to work for than go to work for a bottom-line focused scumbag outfit that’s likely to fail or kick you to the gutter at the first sign that their bottom line is shrinking. That leaves you with another empty spot on your resume to explain when you are back out on the street. Who needs that?

A good place to work attracts good people who stay long-term, who work really hard, who take care of your customers and your suppliers. Employees who are active in your community and alert you to its needs; employees who are alert to environmental issues and keep you caring about those issues. Employees who keep your lenders and your stockholders happy because those employees keep the bucks coming in and the profits piling up. That’s what an ethical business model looks like, what makes it a fun place to work, a great place to work, and a secure place to work.

Don’t Close Your Hand 
                         on the Canary

Suddenly it’s October, and we are into the fourth and last quarter of 2012. This point in time gives us pause to examine why we are here; a time to remember that we are the canaries in the coal mine. Our job is to sniff out and head off the slightest hint of anything that might damage the reputation of our client(s) or our organization. The trick is earning a place of trust that gives us access to thinking and planning at the highest level. We need a place at the right hand of the CEO; a place where we can nip off reputation damage in the bud.

Over more than four decades in communications I have watched the consequences break bad when we lose our focus on this role. It never starts out as a big deal, just some little thing. An action that might escalate into a problem, but it probably won’t, so it’s easy to let it go. Anyway, every time you raise a point it challenges one of the other players and they may not see the danger.  It’s easier to let it pass, to close your hand on the canary.

A move that risks breaking the one rule that we should all have emblazoned on our conference room wall, Warren Buffett’s advice, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Don’t allow anything stand in the way of your role as reputation guardian. I’ve had more than one client refer to me as their “Corporate Conscience,” and not always in a kindly tone. I even lost a client on one occasion when I raised ethical issues; never an easy outcome, but easier than losing a client because something that you let pass damaged or destroyed their reputation.

In recent years I have turned my focus to promoting the ethical business model. The idea that an organization that puts their employees, their customers, their vendors, their community, and the environment first has no need to worry about their lenders or their shareholders because the first five will assure them the best possible shot at profitability. Check out Firms of Endearment, a book detailing a study that shows that firms following those markers were eight times as profitable over a ten year period as the S&P 500 average.

Can anything guarantee profitability? Of course not, just that all things being equal you have a better shot if you follow the markers. It’s a message that resonates well and has given me consulting, speaking, and seminar opportunities, including an invitation to keynote a European Union banking conference on the Island of Malta. I even wrote a book, Play Nice, Make Money, that makes the case for an ethical business model as the most effective route to profitability. It’s a message we need to deliver to those entering the  business world, corporate communications and communications agencies. I welcome any chance to spread that message. Maybe we should all have a pretty yellow canary singing in our reception room to keep us focused on that message.

The Bottom Line

Dog Eat Dog, nothing but the bottom line matters. Surprisingly there are those in business who still buy into this myth. Understand, it works. Goldman Sachs and many of the other Wall Street types come quickly to mind. It is always those who get away with playing dirty and breaking the rules who make the headlines. As the saying goes, “Good News is not News.”

Truth is, from the days of the industrial revolution businesses that treated their stakeholders well– their employees, their customers, their community, their suppliers, and the environment– found that the bottom line took care of itself.   Does that mean the good guys always win? Of course not. It does mean they have a better chance of winning.  And when they do, they win bigger than those who choose the alternative path.

The problem is documenting this truism. A few years ago a writer and couple of  college professors set out to do just that. Their book, Firms of Endearment, showed that those who took care of all their stakeholders returned eight times as much as the Standard and Poors average over the ten years prior to their study. That’s not eight times the worst, that’s eight times the AVERAGE return; that’s the kind of bottom line every company dreams of.

A massive research effort, 10,000 consumers in ten countries, The Cone/Echo 2011 Global Corporate Responsibility Study, shows that consumers not only support those who follow this business model, they will punish businesses that focus solely on the bottom line. The margins surprised the researchers as they did us. Over nine out of ten respondents said that to win their business companies must go beyond the legal requirements and that they need to look at their practices and make sure their overall impact on society as a whole is as positive as possible.

Their number one concern is a company’s efforts to support and expand the economy. Nearly all the respondents (96%) placed economic development at the top of the list they expect companies to strive for. The environment comes in at the same level (96%), followed by human rights, education, health, and poverty, all above -or just below- the ninety percentile mark. That’s pretty dramatic.

And it’s widespread; the study covered a lot of geography: Canada, China, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, The United Kingdom and The United States. Nations that house almost half the people on the planet and by far the majority of enlightened consumers. Consumers who told the researchers that they would switch brands to be assured of their makers’ devotion to high ethical standards.

Pack that all together and it makes for an overwhelming argument for the ethical business model. It makes sense; who would want to do business with someone or a company that is trying to rip you off? Who wants a company that does not care about you, your community, the air you breathe, the water you drink? Who needs those kind of people? You can no more run a company by focusing on the bottom line, than you can win a ball game by focusing on the scoreboard. 

© 2011 GLG