How - Dov Seidman [71]
In Chapter 5, we explored the nature of rules as proxies for the desired values of an organization or society. Industrial age capitalism developed many such proxies and surrogates to stand in for all sorts of things. A resume served as a proxy for your work history. A compliance program told Wall Street and regulators that you are vigilant about regulation. The salary you made at your last job communicated by proxy your value in the marketplace. In the pretransparent age, proxies and surrogates were an efficient way of representing information to others, and we selectively put them forth for the world to see as the best indicators of our worth. Both companies and individuals operating successfully in the age of fortress capitalism had good reason to create and manage by proxies and surrogates: They provided efficient and demonstrable leading indicators. By tracking the indicator, you could easily track progress. A company aiming to improve its customer service response could institute a training program to introduce a set of rules and standards. Since monitoring and tracking the actual performance of each of the thousands of employees who graduated from the program was expensive and time-consuming, the graduation rate became an efficient measure of success, and efficiency, as we know, was the opium of the industrial age. Through much of the twentieth century, contemporary culture relied on proxies and surrogates as crutches because of how difficult or expensive it was to get real-time, in-depth information.
Those days seem to be gone. Think how easy it is to see through to the inner workings of a company today versus just a few years ago. Chat rooms, online forums, instant access to financial reports and transactions, news coverage from around the globe—almost nothing goes unreported or unvaulted somewhere online, where it can be quickly retrieved. I know of a lawyer who works with companies to reduce their risk profiles in the human resource and worker safety areas, and in explaining how he tries cases almost immediately said, “Do you know how many hard drives I cart off each month? It’s the first thing I do. We just pick them up and pour through everything that’s been said or thought about the case. Seeing the inner workings of a company is just a subpoena away.” At every level of society now, the easy access to information has changed both how we judge organizations and what we expect of them. Simply having a hotline does not suffice when we can easily poll your employees to determine whether people are scared to call it or do not trust that it is confidential. Increasingly, we can discover and impute character to an organization to evaluate its norms, values, and practices.
Consumers, customers, regulators, judges, and juries have now begun to view companies from a characterological viewpoint. They pay more attention to, and care more about, the inner life and character of the companies with which they do business. They’ve begun to ask themselves whether the company has integrity. Does it have a character? In such an environment, programs and proxies alone no longer suffice. Those passing judgment in our newly transparent age look past programs and proxies deep into the culture of the company. It already happens every day, in almost every business transaction. Global businesses look deep into the workings of potential partners as trust becomes vital to the transparency they require to open themselves to new forms of collaboration. The best and brightest MBAs profess to be willing to forgo