by Rick Baker
On Feb 23, 2010
Here’s a quote from an article titled ‘Does Corporate Culture Matter? The Case of Enron’, written by A.J. Schuler, Psy.D.
“Enron’s corporate culture best exemplified values of risk taking, aggressive growth and entrepreneurial creativity. These are all positive values. But these values were not balanced by genuine attention to corporate integrity and the creation of customer - and not just shareholder - value. Because the Enron corporate culture was not well grounded, a single scorecard - maximized price per share of common stock - became its reason for being, and even its positive values became liabilities.”
Why was I reading about Enron?
2 reasons…
- We were having a discussion about corporate values and culture.
- During my energy career we worked with many Enron and ex-Enron people: many personal experiences are still vivid in my memory.
Here’s the gist of our discussion…our conclusion.
We agreed, over our business careers many of our failures were consequences of opposed values. We had one set of values. The other folks had a different set of values. And the two sets of values were in [unspoken] conflict.
Expanding on A.J. Schuler’s point, the corporate values reported by Enron appear to be positive. The fact is to those values are only positive when they are guided and bounded by certain attributes of character.
What attributes of character?
A.J. Schuler used the words ‘genuine attention to corporate integrity’.
That captures it…as long as we have a common definition of ‘corporate integrity’, we have a common description of ‘genuine attention’, and we communicate our views about integrity accurately.
That’s where the devil really does hide in the details.
A few years ago, we did a real-life, SouthWestern-Ontario-CEO study of Integrity. If you would like to know the results of our study…email me and I will send a little report to you.
Contact Rick
My next blog will be titled To agree or not to agree, that is the question.