Bad Business Protocolsgreenspun.com : LUSENET : 3gl4d : One Thread |
Craig Hubley on bad business protocols:
unsustainable practices for evading responsibility (Korten 1995 describes this as one of the inevitable effects of 'corporatism') arising in part from over-reliance on management's internal social capital and cultural assumptions, which are an initial source of strength but which ultimately degrade brand equity at the expense of future investors, through various actions or inactions:
- unfair rules of settlement and dispute resolution.
- poor implementation of shared ethical codes in contracts.
- lack of fraud detection and prevention.
- obvious barriers to equity that discourage new talent from joining the company or assisting in the development of the business
- ignorance of social capital or trust relationships
- obvious barriers to growth that defer investors
- a "command and control" civics that paralyzes the organization by overly controlling action and preventing individual action and examples.
- increasing amounts of time and doubt in every transaction as time goes on e.g. employees refer customer problems through several levels of supervision before finally failing to get "permission" to help them
- coercive relationships, with visible use of force to support basic company operations
- poor corporate governance that fails to prevent fraud, wrong-doing or violation of customers' or society's values and ethical codes
- reliance force transactions (e.g. specific measures being passed by governments) to retain business viability
- lowering the price of life defined in the society at large, e.g. by undervaluing risks to life in accidents arising from the products distributed in the business itself.
- inviting financial mutually assured destruction of all partners by engaging in unethical transactions,
- specifically, relying on unsustainable supply or labor relations which are considered to invite infinite regret in one or more of the societies in which the business protocol operates.
- a culture of excuses amongst management, usually restricting the market in control (e.g. with poison pills)
- paraisitically relying on brand equity of associates
- ignoring biosafety or other risks known to the civil society or expressed in the global ethic shared by religions, but not yet shared in the extant ethical codes.
- violations of etiquette respected in the professions on whose talent the business relies.
- poor mechanisms to catalogue exceptions and reduce the cost of dealing with these.
- accounting mechanisms that do not recognize all financial costs, or
- relying exclusively on personal or individual initiative to identify, prioritize, and react to problems.
- are generally unsustainable, or assume too much about market conditions or customer attitudes (e.g. continuing to engage in businesses or rely on subsidies that have little public support and which are only marginally profitable).
- assume the information they act on is unbiased, and exists at one level of certainty
- impose unnecessary barriers to equity, e.g. staff incapable of communicating effectively in major languages
- expend energy in enforcement (which will not be performed by the larger society due to differences in ethical codes).
- relying on continuing selective, or non-uniform, enforcement, of laws
- increasing use of force and a wider, vaguer, sense of doubt about "what is right" and the morality of the business.
- inconsistent rules for quorum that are not scaled to the risk invited by the decision
- trusting one individual or social group with power without linking this to their performance.
- over-centralization of all kinds where no single central entity can actually prevent an infinite regret.
- ignoring individual perspectives on qualitative differences and on infinite regret, especially those that seem to illustrate any assumption that the company can afford the price of Earth.
-- Anonymous, March 21, 2000