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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

The subject refuses to die!

Responding to those who perceive a correlation between business formal attire and a better work ethic, a correspondent points out that while the phrase “empty suit” is well-understood, thus far the phrase “empty t-shirt” has not entered the business lexicon.

Don’t worry. This column isn’t about dress codes. That horse is dead, and has just about stopped twitching.

It’s about work ethic. And whether how hard an employee works is a matter of ethics at all.

It’s tempting to make this a very short column. The answer is, no. With respect to the employee/employer relationship, at least, there is no connection whatever between how hard you work and any ethical consideration of any kind.

Period.

Why would there be?

There could have been, and at one time there might have been. Once upon a time, employers acknowledged ethical obligations toward their employees, such as only terminating them for cause, or when financial circumstances became so dire that the only realistic alternative was bankruptcy. When employers viewed this as an ethical obligation, it was plausible to argue for an ethical quid pro quo — that employees should consider working hard on their employers’ behalf to be an ethical obligation as well.

That stopped being the case in 1997, when the Business Roundtable, the official voice of business (and a powerful lobbyist) redrew the lines. Business leaders previously recognized the obligation to balance the needs of customers, employees, the community and shareholders. That has stopped. According to the Business Roundtable, business leaders now have only one obligation: To maximize shareholder value.

Taken literally, this means compliance with laws and regulations isn’t an obligation, and it’s clear that many businesses simply figure the cost of fines into their return-on-investment calculations. And even among businesses that do consider the law to be an absolute boundary, it’s a less onerous burden when you get to write the text of the law, as is often the case these days.

Employers recognize no obligation to employees beyond the boundaries of the laws they often get to write or at least strongly influence. And sometimes even those are ignored — note the large number of recent class action lawsuits related to compulsory “off the clock” and unpaid overtime work. (Before anyone writes about these indicating a need for tort reform: Juries, after hearing the actual evidence, are finding the companies guilty, which just might indicate that they really are guilty and really do owe the plaintiffs money.)

If employers acknowledge no ethical obligation to employees, only what is required by enforced laws and whatever is in the policy manual, why should employees acknowledge an ethical obligation to work hard?

There is no reason. “Work ethic” is simply a well-chosen phrase, an example of using vocabulary to slip an idea past mental barriers that otherwise would discard it as worthless.

If an employer tried to persuade its employees that working hard is an ethical rather than contractual obligation, employees would evaluate the logic of the proposition. By instead packaging the same proposition as vocabulary, employees let it slide on by, perhaps because we’ve all been taught that arguing about word choice is semantic nitpicking (my partner claims this attitude has given rise to rabid antisemanticism).

And since work ethic has become part of our vocabulary, we’ve all — employees and managers alike — unconsciously accepted the notion that working hard is an ethical obligation when there’s no logic at all to support this notion.

There is simply an implied contract between employer and employee. It says employees who work harder and smarter for longer hours receive bigger bonuses and raises, and perhaps promotions as well.

To the extent employers live up to their side of the bargain, hard work is a matter of enlightened self interest. To the extent employers don’t live up to their side of the bargain, promoting empty suits and paying excessive executive salaries while requiring unpaid overtime, employees who work as hard as they can are being suckered.

As an IT leader, you’re supposed to create a high-performance organization. Part of doing so is motivating employees to work hard, work smart, and when necessary work long hours as well. To do so you have two choices.

You can bandy about the phrase “work ethic” and hope they fall for the ruse. Or, you can reward hard smart work and live up to your side of the bargain.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“Since you have now abused the trust I placed in you when I subscribed to your newsletter by using my address for unauthorized purposes (e.g. marketing), please unsubscribe me from your mailing list.” — From a now-former KJR subscriber, in response to the recent e-mail promoting our upcoming seminars.

Juxtapose it with “IS Survivor Publishing’s Complex Legalese Privacy Policy”:

By registering at ISSurvivor.com and providing your name and e-mail address, you give IS Survivor Publishing blanket permission to send you occasional e-mails describing new products, services or other offerings available from IS Survivor Publishing. That’s the price you pay for getting Keep the Joint Running for free. If you don’t like it … heck, tell us what you’re willing to pay to get KJR without our exercises in self-promotion. We’re open-minded about such matters.

In exchange, we commit to the following privacy policy: You’ll only hear from us (“us” is defined as IS Survivor Publishing and our parent company, IT Catalysts, Inc.), and not more than a couple of times each month.

We won’t sell or rent our list to anyone else. If we change our minds about this we’ll notify you and give you a chance to opt out.

I’m not feeling particularly apologetic, having sent a mere two promotional mailings in the past eleven months. Still, the half-dozen or so complaints I received got me thinking about spam, how it’s defined, and what to do about it.

The common definitions of spam include three characteristics: It’s e-mail that’s (1) unsolicited; (2) sent for commercial purposes; and (3) transmitted to a large distribution list. The common definitions are worthless. Here’s why:

If all unsolicited e-mail is spam then all e-mail is spam. What are you supposed to do — only send e-mail after a friend has spoken to you on the telephone requesting it? Every e-mail thread begins with an unsolicited message. That’s the nature of communication.

If all e-mail sent for commercial purposes is spam, then no vendor is ever allowed to send an e-mail to a client. That serves nobody’s interests.

Now about that mailing list bit. That doesn’t help either, or Keep the Joint Running, and every other e-mail newsletter received by people who chose to subscribe, would be considered spam.

So it’s a Boolean “and”: All three criteria must be present. Except for this: More recipients registered for my seminars than complained, even though it was unsolicited, commercial, and sent to a list. (There is, however, still room — feel free to register!)

If the standard definition is wrong, what’s right? When I talk about spam, it’s about the collected mass of all e-mails I receive that I don’t want, not the individual message. It’s the clutter that makes it spam, which is what makes this a hard problem to solve.

Spam is a bit like a bunch of men crowding around a beautiful woman, asking her for a date. She finds most to be drunk, obnoxious, and disgusting, and the group as a whole to be offensive. But she does date someone, and eventually most of these guys find a woman who wants to date them. Which is to say, no matter how obnoxious or disgusting each spam message you receive is to you, someone somewhere wants to buy what each seller has to offer. And it’s possible that among the mass of messages are one or two offering products and services that are of interest to you.

If ISPs charged by the byte — if there was a cost for the stamp — spammers would start targeting their lists. It can’t happen. Without legislation it would be collusion and a violation of the antitrust laws. Presumably, in these anti-regulatory times, nobody wants legislation requiring it. And even if Congress were to pass such a strange law, all that would happen would be that spammers would sign up with ISPs in Bulgaria or the Caymans that aren’t subject to U.S. laws.

The magical curative properties of the marketplace, too-often espoused as the panacea that will cure all ills, are what cause this problem. The marketplace can’t solve it. If that isn’t clear, read Garrett Hardin’s classic paper, The Tragedy of the Commons. Spam is a perfect example.

How about a legislative solution? The CAN-SPAM act, whose double entendre of a name is entirely apt, isn’t going to fix very much, although I hope it puts a dent in the now-popular practices of spoofing and system hijacking.

So if neither the marketplace nor legislation can fix the problem of spam, and unit pricing, which could, will never happen, what’s the solution?

Nothing. There is no solution. Spam is a problem that will be with us for a long, long time.

I hope you have a good spam filter.

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