ABC: Always Be Compassionate

A beneficial future depends on adopting a new corporate ethics

ABC, Always Be Compassionate, is the alternative to the slogan, Always Be Closing, promoted in the movie, Glenngary Glenn Ross. “Always Be Closing” has become a popular mantra in the world of sales: The primary instruction for salespeople is, “Always Be Closing Deals”. The movie, Glenngary Glenn Ross, accentuates the urgency and the importance of this dictum for salespeople by giving an example of a fairly sleazy salesperson talking through different ways to close a deal, even though it meant offering little or no value or negative value to the customers. This is the epitome of the Machiavellian approach to running a company, that it doesn't really matter what effect you have on the customers, as long as you're closing, as long as you're making money.

Typically the argument is made that free markets have the power to correct these situations. So as said in the movie Wall Street, “greed is good”, that if you're just motivated by greed, then even if you're screwing over your customers, then you will be making money and somehow that magically converts your selfish, greedy action into something that's virtuous by growing the economy and earning money for the company. That implies there's no ethic necessary other than the profit ethic.

My view is that this particular view of the power of the free market comes from Machiavellian or psychotic business leaders taking a casual look at the power of free markets and interpreting it in a way that serves their own ends while promoting that as some kind of universal good. That means that the law is the limit on how you should make money, or perhaps the limit is the expected risks and costs of getting caught. If you determine that the legal costs and risks are less than the benefits you'll gain, then this would justify an action.

I feel like this is the ultimate disrespect to Adam Smith, author of both The Wealth of Nations and A Theory of Moral Sentiments. I feel like he would never have agreed that an arbitrary action was justifiable just because it made money and netted some financial benefit for the company in a free market. He was a profoundly ethical man and a deep thinker.

I propose the dictum Always Be Compassionate as an alternative that takes an ethical approach first. The idea of compassion is that you're always solving problems and that your first and primary obligation is to solve a problem.

If you solve a problem for a customer, the customer will be happy to pay you for solving that problem and the customer will need to pay you enough that you can stay in business to solve more and more problems. Always Be Compassionate creates structures that reward problem-solving behavior. They don't just reward shrewd sales behavior or aggressive sales behavior or exploitative sales behavior, behavior where you're intentionally withholding critical information from customers that they would need to make a wise and informed decision. Lying as a sales tactic is the opposite of Always Be Compassionate.

If you're really compassionate, you would not be lying. Lying in the workplace is the original sin, the cardinal sin, and those who feel that it is necessary to lie to survive, they're just taking their personal lack of morals and ethics and projecting that on the company as some kind of an actual standard.

Who makes these standards? Who makes the rules about what's correct or incorrect in businesses?

We do. Human beings do. If a person were to say that lying, cheating, stealing, killing, defrauding others is fine. What would you think of that person?

The question of individual ethics is extremely well established in society. Our society is full of stories about the positive consequences of individuals acting in ethical ways and the negative consequences of people acting in unethical ways.

The modern question however, is how is your corporation acting? Corporations have much more power than individuals.

Individual power is almost insignificant. Democracy is diluting to the point of being unrecognizable in the face of corporate power to influence public perception and votes. Public perception follows money. Whoever can buy the most advertisements and craft the most clever manipulations can sway popular opinion. So corporate ethics matters even more than individual ethics.

So, of course, we could have a world of rapacious corporations. We could have a world of psychotic corporations, narcissistic corporations that think only they are important, Machiavellian corporations that think they can do anything they want as long as the company thrives and prospers financially. This is the dark triad of corporate psychology.

For anybody who argues that the dark triad can't possibly apply to a company because a company is not an individual, there is no company other than a bunch of individuals. The company is just a shared collective of thoughts, feelings, and actions of a bunch of individuals. The individuals all think in a similar way, establish certain policies for the company. Those are the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the company, the views and values and behaviors of the company. And if those are psychotic or narcissistic or Machiavellian, then it's true for the company, it's true for the individual.

Companies need these codes of ethics. Some people might argue that the behaviors of corporations don't follow the same rules as human beings. So if a corporation kills someone, should that be treated with different rules than if a person kills someone? If a corporation steals from someone, should that be viewed by different rules than if a person stole from someone? If a corporation lies, should that be viewed differently?

What exactly is it about a corporation that makes their actions somehow different from the individual? Shouldn’t an action be judged based on the effect it has on the individual, not based on who's doing it? Whether a small person hits someone or a large person hits someone, their action should be based on the nature of the action not their size.

If a small person hits someone very hard, it's a very negative action. If a large person hits someone very gently, it's probably not a negative action at all. So the nature of an action depends on the effect. The rightness or wrongness of the action depends upon the effect.

Morality applies to the action, not to the actor. The actor is just empty, the actor is just a container. It could be an individual, it could be a corporation, the corporation could say, “this was the decision of an individual”, the individual could say, “this is the decision of a corporation”, but we know from rules like the Geneva Convention that soldiers are responsible for their individual actions even if they were ordered by a superior commanding officer to perform those actions. So each individual is still responsible for their own ethical behavior.

The policies of a corporation cannot and should not overrule the individual's ethics. Just as we're in a transition phase from the power of individuals to the power of corporations, we need to be in a transition phase for ethics and what it means to live an ethical life, moving from individual ethics to corporate ethics. And the primary corporate ethic is A-B-C, Always Be Compassionate, always be solving some problem, don't be creating problems. A corporation that creates more problems than it solves doesn't deserve to remain in existence until it changes that behavior.

A corporation that solves more problems than it causes should always be protected and preserved. It is a social good to have that. If individuals won't support the corporation, the government should support the corporation because it is in the collective best interest. If the role of government is to help all of the people, then they should support whatever helps all of the people.

There's a tremendous amount of obfuscation that's done making corporate ethics seem like it's something more complicated or more obscure or something that individuals can't understand if they don't have an MBA or if they're not senior corporate executives. But every individual understands the impact of corporations on our behavior. That impact is obvious because we're the ones who are impacted, whether we're impacted by an individual, a corporation, or a technology, the impact is the same. We feel the impact and we should try to understand where the impact came from.

If a problem comes from a person, or from a technology, or from nature, of from a corporation, in all cases we feel similarly: It shouldn't be causing these sufferings to us. So must drive this push for corporate ethics? We must.

We the people are affected by corporations. Everyone is affected by corporations, including the owners of corporations, all of the world's billionaires and CEOs, our customers, and everyone else. Any person could experience food poisoning in a restaurant just the same as us. So everyone is the same in needing fair protections, needing, for example, the government to enforce health codes and standards in restaurants to prevent food poisoning.

Always Be Compassionate.