Case

What would you have done?

Third in a series on ethics in business communications
by Dean Williams, President, Williams Savvy & Associates
Strategic Communications Counsel

We may never know the role business communicators played behind the scenes at Enron and Andersen before their activities became public.

We do know that senior Enron executive Sherron Watkins raised her concerns with her bosses at Enron and with Andersen. Now she is celebrated in the media for her courage — a rare status for whistleblowers.

We have also learned from Watkins that J. Clifford Baxter, an Enron employee for 10 years, raised concerns after becoming vice-chair of Enron’s Board of Directors. He resigned in May 2001 within six months of becoming vice-chair.

In stark contrast to the fate of Watkins, Baxter was found dead in January this year from an apparent suicide shortly after the Senate began hearings into Enron’s activities.

More often than not, employees who question senior decision-makers face a rough ride. There is no point romanticizing the consequences.

That being said, if you had been an Enron or Andersen employee with knowledge of activities that are now being investigated by the U.S. Senate and Justice Department, what would you have done?

I have argued in past columns that effective business communicators bring more to the job than being a good writer, multi-tasker, creative thinker, or a people person.

We also need to bring our good judgement, our finger on the public’s pulse and a keen sense of our audience’s culture, standards, and expectations. That’s the context for and the real value of the work that we do and the advice that you give.

As a business communicator, our job is to help create, defend and promote the best image for our employer or client. It helps if we feel good about our employer or client. It also helps if we work in a corporate culture that actively supports and promotes ethical practices.

Realistically, day-to-day operations and decision-making may rarely pose serious ethical dilemmas for the majority of employees. Sometimes the real ethical dilemma is whether we should even be working for our employer or client. But not many business communicators have the luxury of shopping around for the ideal employer.

While most organizations have well-written codes of conduct that set out carefully worded ethical guidelines, all too often the code is neither communicated nor enforced.

In Enron’s case, its board of directors apparently went so far as to suspend the code of conduct!

That, of course, speaks volumes for the role of ethics in Enron’s corporate culture, especially when you consider that the board of directors is supposed to act as the ethical conscience of an organization.

But let’s assume that Enron is an extreme case. How about Arthur Andersen, then?

In the words of Andersen’s former managing partner and chief executive officer, Joseph F. Berardino, "Maintaining the trust and confidence of investors is a central tenet of our firm."

The same could be said of the entire accounting profession where credibility and integrity are traditionally cornerstones of their reputation. One would expect the profession to work extra hard at ensuring a high ethics quotient in their corporate culture.

How did it happen, then, that Andersen lost not only the trust and confidence of investors, but also of clients, overseas affiliates, the SEC and U.S. Justice Department?

Enron wasn’t even the first public relations crisis of this type for Andersen. The integrity of Andersen’s reporting practices had faced harsh criticism over the years. But rather than reform its unethical practices, Andersen paid its fines, settled lawsuits and put its efforts into better methods of destroying evidence.

Now Andersen is fighting just to survive–its public relations efforts rendered impotent or even detrimental to the company’s image. Furthermore, the entire accounting profession is coming under intense scrutiny and the credibility of their clients is in danger of being tainted by association.

These events have implications that reach far beyond the accounting profession. There are important lessons that all corporations ignore at their own peril–whether or not, as some analysts predict, the overt implications of these events should fade by the fall.

Daily media reports on Andersen, like some morbid deathwatch, have had a profound effect on our culture. As business communicators, we need to be especially vigilant.

"Now more than ever, the communication person needs to be an advocate for ethical behaviour because the truth always surfaces sooner or later," says Len Brooks, Executive Director of The Clarkson Centre for Business Ethics at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. "The longer you indulge in the practice of maintaining a cosmetic shell, the harder it is to recover when the shell eventually cracks."

As valuable employees, we have our finger on the pulse of society. We know that corporate ethics isn’t just some ivory tower concept. Ethics and corporate responsibility is now an integral part of what our society perceives as being acceptable business practice. Matthew Boyle summed it up nicely in his analysis of Fortune Magazine’s Most Admired Companies:

"What qualities will we admire most in the years ahead? That’s an easy one–in the near term, at least. Thanks to the Enron implosion and the subsequent rash of accounting and corporate-governance scandals, the credibility of any corporation is no longer assumed. It must be earned. If you don’t lay all your cards on the table, we’ll assume you’re a cheat. It’s not enough to have a great brand, dazzling returns, and a charming CEO. Now more than ever, trust is the sine qua non of reputation. There’s no mystery about that."

Dean Williams is president of Williams Savvy & Associates, Strategic Communications Counsel. His past columns on ethics for Communicator will also be appearing in Communications World. Dean can be contacted at dean_williams@savvypr.com.