All Posts in Business Ethics

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Usually, I get the joke.

I don’t always think it’s funny, but at least I get it. Not always, though — in a recent column I reported on the antics of a certain “Dr. Richard Paley, teacher of Divinity and Theobiology, Fellowship University,” who exposed all of us in IT as Darwinians, atheists and pagans. As a number of readers were kind enough to explain, “Dr. Paley” is a satire. In my defense, The Register reported the story as fact, a Hoaxbusters search came up empty, and I did find it hilarious. I just didn’t realize it was supposed to be.

Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection appears in this column on a regular basis. This isn’t because “Survival Guide” is related to “Survival of the Fittest.” The latter phrase, never used by Darwin himself, comes from Herbert Spencer’s ludicrous theory of “Social Darwinism” — ludicrous because it considered fitness to be absolute, justifying hereditary aristocracy as the consequence of natural superiority.

In Darwinian theory, fitness is contextual, measuring how well a heritable trait fits specific conditions. That’s a concept you can take to the bank when managing your career: Success comes from how well you adapt to circumstances. There are no panaceas, which means we can all ignore the 90% or so of all business pundits who sell “the answer” without first hearing the question.

This same philosophy can help you plot a course for your IT organization. I’ve read various authorities expound on the proper role of IT in business. Some call for strategic partnership, some consider IT’s proper role to be a service provider, while yet others think we’re an “information utility.” If they understood modern evolutionary theory, they’d spend less time advocating one or another as the right answer, and more assessing which circumstances each of these very different models is best suited to.

Evolutionary theory applies to all situations in which entities compete, which means we in business can benefit from a century and a half of scientific research. To take just one example:

The estimable Richard Dawkins has argued that natural selection is a competition among genes, not whole organisms — that an organism is just a gene’s way of succeeding. This insight simplifies the apparently mystifying behavior of companies that self-destruct while creating “shareholder value.” Substitute gene for shareholder and organism for company and everything suddenly makes sense –plenty of bodies are designed to die in order to help their genes succeed.

The lesson for you: Shareholder value and your own best interests don’t necessarily coincide. Plan accordingly.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Marilyn vos Savant, the professional genius, proved that the egg came first. Heritable mutations happen only in sperm and ova, she reasoned, so something that was almost a chicken laid a true chicken egg. Makes sense to me.

As we sit in the rubble of Enron, ImClone, Worldcom, Tyco, AOL, and other, as-yet-undiscovered or unpublicized corporate implosions, it’s worthwhile to wonder which is the egg: The lack of accountability resulting from more than two decades of business deregulation, or the corrupt perspective of the corporate elite who acquired the resulting additional power.

Lord Acton notwithstanding, I think the corruption came first. It’s the egg, and it smells rotten.

Government regulation is what allows businesses to act ethically. Without regulation, those businesses that resort to any tactic to win have the advantage over those that restrict their behavior to conventional codes of ethics. Consequently, ethical CEOs should welcome government regulation, not fight it. It levels the proverbial playing field. The goal of an ethical CEO would be efficient regulation, not deregulation.

For more than two decades we’ve been subjected to unrelenting propaganda from the BIG/GAS (Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid) contingent decrying any and all regulation as a fundamentally bad idea. Regulation, we’ve been assured, prevents American businesses from being competitive in world markets, harms productivity, and hampers profitability.

What bunk. The additional profitability stemming from deregulation turned out to be the result of an increased ability to cook the books. And if deregulation has made American business more competitive, it’s hard to find the evidence — trade deficits are at record levels — but it certainly has made it less accountable to anyone.

Business will be re-regulated. Current abuses are too simply too flagrant. The question is how; the probable answer is badly. The business community no longer has the credibility to be part of the process, which leaves it to Congress and executive-branch agencies to design the regulations. Their goal will be minimizing any chance of new abuses, unfettered by considerations of how hard or easy it will be to comply.

Every new regulation will result in reporting requirements, every reporting requirement will require new information technology, and nobody is going to care how hard it is to build.

Which means CIOs and CTOs will be reaching for the Excedrin.

Assuming, of course, that new regulation hasn’t turned Excedrin into a prescription drug.

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