The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [25]
We can never pass enough laws to make men ethical. There were already some seventy-one thousand pages of federal regulations plus SEC and New York Stock Exchange rules on the books at the time the Enron scandal broke. Laws against fraud are very clear, yet in the run-up to the troubled mortgage market that came unraveled in the summer of 2007 there were Web sites where you could obtain phony identification, even get phony pay stubs, in order to secure mortgages from loan officers who should have been aware that such chicanery was not only possible but probable. The subprime crisis resulted from some very poor judgment coupled in some cases with outright criminal actions.
Today as I write this, despite stricter (some would say too strict) regulations and despite public outrage over excessive executive compensation and questionable executive behavior, we still hear about some business leaders’ running close to the line.
I find this attitude difficult to understand. All I can conclude is that these leaders were and are so out of touch (see Commandment Four) that they have no sense of the common human frailties we all share—including their own.
While in the navy, toward the end of World War II, I was assigned duty in a hospital that was administering to some of the worst wounded cases: amputees, the blind, the deaf, and those who had been traumatized to the degree that they could no longer talk. My military record must have indicated something about speech experience in high school because I was put to work in the aural rehabilitation center dealing with those who had speech handicaps. I was totally unqualified, but picked up some techniques from the one other actual therapist in the hospital and together we improvised a reasonable record of patient speech recovery.
Among patients there was no rank. Enlisted men and officers were treated the same. During the rehabilitation process enlisted men battled their way back to full recovery, yet some officers who had never questioned their own abilities were reduced to broken shadows of their former selves, full of despair. My experience in this hospital made me acutely aware at a very early age of both the nobility and the fragility of the human being. The distance between the two traits is not that great. People can rise up to do extraordinary things. And they can fall far and fast.
A hospital, particularly a military hospital full of badly damaged people, tends to focus one on our similarities rather than our differences, on our shared needs and vulnerabilities. Scratch us and we all do bleed.
The Jesuit priest and distinguished paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin noted that “no evolutionary future awaits man except in association with all other men.” I agree. Therefore, it not only behooves us to treat our fellow human beings with compassion and respect, it is essential for our collective survival. Unethical men and women can flourish for periods, sometimes very long periods, but ultimately their lack of morality—and their lack of humility—destroys them. You cannot build a strong and lasting business on a rotten foundation.
I was proud of the fact that The Coca-Cola Company always had a corporate culture founded on trust and the absolute necessity of doing the right thing.
I vividly remember when NBC ran a documentary back in the 1970s on the plight of migrant workers. We were utterly appalled to see that many of these people, hired by third-party labor contractors, were at work in our Minute Maid groves in Florida, some living in dreadful conditions. Paul Austin, our CEO at the time, sent our president, Luke Smith, and several others, including me, down to investigate. Conditions in many instances