Do businesses lack integrity?
My friend Nick Whitnell was the first ever subscriber to Oxymoron. Over the past few months we’ve been meeting up at the wonderful plant based, organic Crow Spotter café in the New Forest, trying to get our heads around the big questions that keep us up at night. Looking back, I wonder if this newsletter would exist if it wasn’t for these conversations.
Nick spent many years as a hot shot marketing executive in the insurance industry before leaving it behind in search of something more meaningful, and now helps organisations that align with his values. One of the things that he’s got me thinking about is his theory that while sustainability might be an important goal for our society, to get there we need more than just technology, regulations and good intentions. We need something more fundamental. We need integrity.
I’m going to be taking some time offline for a couple of weeks to celebrate my 40th birthday and while I’m gone, I want to share some thoughts with you on this topic of integrity. This week I’m sharing some of my own thoughts on how integrity fits into the picture of sustainable business and next week Nick will write a guest post sharing his perspective.
Why is integrity important?
I’m sure some of you are reading this thinking that integrity sounds like a fundamentally good thing, but what’s it got to do with sustainable business?
I often think that if we were aliens arriving at the Earth from another galaxy, we’d view humans as a primitive and dangerous species of pest. Despite having been gifted an unusually perfect planet, the humans squander their abundant resources, destroy species and ecosystems, and ruthlessly fight among themselves. However, if these aliens observed any individual human beings with their friends and families, they might see that on average, we are quite nice creatures. There is something strange about us humans, that the sum of us is very different from the average.
This appears to be true at the corporate level too. Corporations are, after all, just groups of humans organised to work as a unit. There are so many examples of corporations acting irresponsibly, from environmental harm, to exploitation of workers, to putting their own customers in danger. Yet these organisations are comprised of human beings who individually are probably mostly nice people who care about their friends, families and communities and would like to think of themselves as “good people“.
Somehow, when we humans form ourselves into large groups, we relinquish some of our responsibility as if someone else in the group is taking that responsibility for us. We abdicate some of our personal responsibility to the abstract entity that we call ‘The Company’ and blindly hope that all will be well. We hide behind statements like “I'm just doing my job” or “It’s just business” as if work takes place in a world separate from reality, where ordinary morals and consequences don’t apply. It’s as if we temporarily cease to be human when we are at work.
We even have legal structures for businesses that define them as entities separate from any one human. In the eyes of the law, businesses are people and as such are responsible for their own actions. But companies in the legal sense are just imaginary constructs created for administrative purposes. Strip that away and all we are left with underneath a corporate identity are the human beings that own, operate and work within them.
It is when we see businesses clearly as just groups of humans that for me, the role of integrity becomes clear. Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. If you believe that most humans are fundamentally good, then it follows that if we all acted with integrity then our collective actions should result in corporate behaviours that broadly mirror our shared values. If we all acted with integrity, then perhaps we would draw boundaries to prevent the worst aspects of corporate exploitation and would invest more of our resources in creating the type of society that the majority of us want to live in.
Of course, even if we are all fundamentally good at heart, we are also all flawed. Acting with integrity wouldn’t necessarily lead to a perfect society where businesses all behave as ideal citizens. Mistakes would still be made and sometimes things would get off track. However, I think we underestimate just how much power we each have as individuals to positively influence the world around us, including the collective behaviour of our organisations, simply by having the bravery to be true to ourselves and stand for what we believe in.
An imbalance of power
Having said all this, there is an elephant in the room. Or perhaps more accurately, there is a psychopath in the boardroom. I think one of the reasons that the actions of corporations don’t align with the values of the people who work within them is that some people’s behaviours have more influence than others. Senior leaders and investors in particular wield a disproportionate amount of influence, for good or for bad. If the leadership lacks integrity, and other people leave their own integrity at the door when they arrive at work, there’s almost nothing to keep corporations in check. Government regulation is the backstop of last resort.
But imagine on the other hand if every single person approached their work with true integrity, being true to themselves and others, acting in line with their own values and being prepared to face some hardship for the things that they believe in. Even corporations with psychopath CEO’s would act more responsibly. What’s more, maybe psychopath senior leaders might not get these top jobs in the first place. Integrity has the power to change the world of business, and to change the world.
Over to Nick
If I’ve got a bit too idealistic this week, forgive me, it’s my birthday! I’m off now to swim in a lake and enjoy the wonders of reality away from the screen.
Tune in next week to read Nick’s perspective on the importance of integrity in our attempts to use business as a force for good.