Profit with Honor by Daniel Yankelovich

Author:Daniel Yankelovich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Higher Expectations

There is another dimension of caring associated with stewardship ethics. It is the recognition that with greater privilege goes greater responsibility. The French call it noblesse oblige, and we in the United States think of it as "meeting higher expectations."The principle here is that those with greater access to resources, power, and influence have a special stewardship obligation to serve the wider society.

In my Introduction, I quoted Wal-Mart's CEO, who stated that he had been shocked by Wal-Mart's critics into acknowledging the legitimacy of this principle. Many of our elite institutions and successful individuals embody this principle— Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, Bill Gates, Trinity Church of New York, and so on. It is violations of the unwritten rules of higher expectations that make companies like Pfizer look so bad. Because it is the largest and richest of the drug companies, more is expected of its leadership—a broader orbit of concern than one might expect from smaller, less powerful, less well-heeled companies. Pfizer should be leading the way to discover new policies and methods for making drugs more affordable for everyone rather than leading the way to making them less affordable. Stewardship ethics is as simple and straightforward as that.

Recognition of higher expectations stretches goals for organizations. It expands their orbit of caring. The main focus of the 2005 meeting of top executives at Davos, Switzerland, concerned the broadest possible orbit for business—the opportunities and responsibilities of the rich nations of the world to bring the five billion or so poor people in the developing world into the market economy—to make profitable consumers out of the billions of people now subsisting on one or two dollars a day or less.

Davos participants had the creative imagination to explore how a combination of technology, entrepreneurship, sheer market power, and goodwill might enable nations to become profitable markets and viable societies. The methods of realizing this sort of bold vision are varied. One of the most promising is the microlending that the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh pioneered. Now mainstream banks like Citigroup have expanded their microlending efforts in Mexico and India and have come to see them as potentially profitable long-term business opportunities. Procter and Gamble is experimenting with low-cost water purification methods in developing nations. Hewlett-Packard is seeking new ways of bringing technology to third-world countries, opening up new markets.

In sum, the caring aspect of stewardship takes multiple forms—caring about performance, caring about employees and customers, caring about the business as a community, and taking on special responsibilities because you have the means and resources to do so. But stewardship ethics also sets priorities among these various forms of caring—priorities that put performance ahead of bureaucratic needs and that seek to leave the company under its care better off.

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