Contrary to what others may think, business is personal. It is personal because it is made up of people as emotional as they are irrational, who make decisions based on gut more often than on fact, and who use subjective yardsticks like ethics to keep both emotional and utilitarian reflexes on a leash. Business is personal because a company develops a character like any other person, and people grow to either respect or loathe that company based on how it demonstrates its character throughout its life. Business is personal because, like a child who does as promised or a child who misbehaves, it is either rewarded or punished by the volatile and unyielding eye of the market.
When I think of HB Fuller, I don’t think about the money they donate to the symphony, the charities they contribute to or the work they do in their communities. I think of glue. Known at large as general do-gooders, HB Fuller dealt its employees and customers a huge blow when the public learned that Resistol, its strongest-selling glue in Third-World countries, contributes to the rampant problem of street addiction among children in the same places that so favorably pad the bottom line.
Harvard Business School's HB Fuller case study is a good example of actions in conflict with veneer and track record. This type of dilemma is something I come into contact with in my personal and professional life. At my company, my job is to develop relationships with other businesses that become profitable for us over the long-term. In the course of time, it is only natural that many of these relationships begin to feel personal.
Because we provide online driver education to teens, one dynamic in which a great deal of conflict arises lies in developing reciprocal relationships with driving schools. Many of them exhibit intense dislike toward us. I once received a voice mail from a driving school owner who told me I have the blood of dead teens on my hands. The thing is, I genuinely believe we are putting a beneficial service into the marketplace. If I felt otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to do my job.
I often find myself in the position of assuring driving schools we do not seek to take away their business, though truthfully all have been hurt by the advent of online driver education. Even I know their classroom attendance is a fraction of what it once was. I want them to feel it’s in their best interest to retain students they won’t find in those classrooms any longer by developing a partnership with our company. They send students who’d like to take online drivers ed to us; we send students who need driver training to them. These are mutually beneficial relationships and as they develop, driving school owners who once disliked me are now friends. They share personal anecdotes, advice and old dreams.
With that in mind, things got tough when we unrolled a new driver training component in pockets of
I remember the reflexive desire to lie or stall the truth. When affiliates started calling me, however, I found I couldn’t do that. Their voices were concerned, cadenced with a faith in me I didn’t want to abuse. Like HB Fuller, I could have provided them with ambiguous answers and made small, short-term assurances that took the spotlight off my position. But not only did I view this as merely a short-term solution (won’t they find out anyway, even years later, when we shut down their reciprocal programs?), I also didn’t feel I would be able to sit well with myself afterward. You don’t screw partners over.
In the end I chose to talk to my affiliates about the matter. I explained that, while we plan on expanding our driver training program, we also plan on maintaining beneficial relationships between ourselves and other schools. To ensure this commitment, I spoke to my team about the issue and we concluded that if we move into a city an affiliate already serves we’ll give students the option of choosing between our service and the affiliate’s with a price comparison. They can also pay for either option right online. This way students make the best choice based on their preferences, and instead of shutting affiliates out, we compete with them in terms of price and quality like any other driving school. I wasn’t sure how this would go over with the driving school owners, but most were pleased with this decision. Others were ambivalent, but they maintained their faith in our company’s goodwill, asking only that I let them know when we unroll the driver training component in their cities. I assured them I would.
The action I took brought the RU 486 case to mind. I considered the bind Roussel UCLAF found itself in when facing threats by opponents to the drug. I admired the company for finding a creative route to solving the issue, publicly stepping back over increasing citizen concern so the French Health Minister had to “force” them to continue providing the drug at the risk of losing their patent.
Roussel UCLAF’s actions in the RU 486 case are an excellent example of partnering with others to come up with a creative solution that may not be immediately visible on the surface of the problem. And while some may view their actions as manipulative, I don’t believe any ethical lines were crossed. Roussel UCLAF’s concern lay in protecting the safety and morale of its employees. They also contributed to a decline in costly French abortions that the government often had to pay for. These seemingly conflicting prerogatives were satisfied without stepping on toes, which may have generated violence from opponents.
There lies in all of us a sense of duty to express our core values in all valuable relationships, professional or personal. HB Fuller, a company that was otherwise vocal and prominent about the goodwill gestures it makes in public, failed to hold up to what it claimed to value when it fumbled through pretenses of action that yielded no improvement – no result at all, really – regarding the abuse of its products by poor children. In my view, they had a couple of options. They could have come up with a creative decision, like Roussel UCLAF. The inclusion of mustard seed oil was one such option. Or they could have taken the path of Merck.
If HB Fuller was concerned about the potential loss of 70-90% of Resistol profits over the short term, Merck put them to shame with the action it took when determining what to do with ivermectin. Knowing it could make no money on the drug but realizing it could cure millions of people in the
The Merck, HB Fuller and Roussel UCLAF cases demonstrate that business is deeply personal. People run businesses and they affect other people, for better or worse. Every action one person makes that affects another is potentially life-changing. With such a vast responsibility, it’s only fair that we carry our ethics with us in the professional realm.
That’s not to say we impose our views about how life should be led onto others. One such example occurred when a friend of mine went to a pharmacist for emergency contraceptives. From experience, I know no regular pharmacist can issue this drug to you; only a certified pharmacist can, and the average pharmacy normally has only one or two on staff. If you’re busy, it’s hard to match your schedule to a certified pharmacist’s, and worse still when you have to do so within the three-day window in which emergency contraceptives must be taken.
In any event, my friend was denied emergency contraceptives because the certified pharmacist was opposed to abortion. Another such example occurred when a friend with cancer was told his doctor would not perform a surgery that would potentially save his life because his religious beliefs prevented him from doing so. I don’t believe these choices are ethical. They put people at risk and, instead of upholding core ethics, serve only to impose private opinions onto the public with disastrous, sometimes fatal results.
Ethics and opinions aren’t cut from the same cloth. Upholding your ethics is often a painful choice that may require you to oblige for the good of others even if you feel personally repelled, as demonstrated by HB Fuller, who flinched at the potential of losing a massive profit base while risking children’s lives. That’s not to say we should feel forced to do things we ourselves find morally wrong. I only suggest that, while we uphold certain standards for ourselves, we must also respect the standards and rights of others. And it takes a great leap to do this in circumstances we may find unsavoury at best, without letting our opinions get into the way.
This delicate balance is the line along which personal and professional responsibility supposedly collide. Personal responsibility lies in the way you choose to live your life. Professional responsibility has to do with a commitment to others: customers, partners, colleagues and superiors. While the certified pharmacist and the doctor who served (or didn’t serve) my friends may have been acting from a platform of personal responsibility, I don’t believe they acted responsible as professionals. When you take a job, you take on the expectations and responsibilities embedded in it. If they don’t suit you, you either don’t take the job or find a creative way to make sure those expectations and responsibilities are met, even if not by you. That’s part of being a good steward of the people who depend on your profession.
HB Fuller failed to demonstrate personal and professional responsibility by neglecting to respond adequately to the issues arising in
Merck, on the other hand, demonstrated keen personal and professional responsibility by upholding its values and doing what was right for their company over the long-term. Roussel UCLAF did the same thing. While I don’t know much about Roussel UCLAF’s corporate values, it grew clear from the case study that key players like Baulieu, Sakiz and Evin respected one another’s unique circumstances. They also demonstrated a shared concern for those who need abortions and the employees who needed protection from the potentially violent backlash of pro-lifers. So together a chemist, a businessman and a civil servant were able to make a decision that was ethically sound for all of them, not to mention beautifully orchestrated, socially beneficial and profitable. If three such people can yield these results, what excuse do the rest of us have not to try to be creative?
Globalization is not a promise of tomorrow. It’s a fact of today, and the children of today will grow up to view it as a fundamental aspect of their lives. In an increasingly globalized marketplace it grows only clearer that business is personal, because a business of any size is deeply embedded in the everyday lives of many people. In a climate where the largest corporations have larger operating budgets than many countries do, some may argue that business rule the world. Perhaps it does, but I don’t think it’s logical to imagine corporations as monsters who exist independently of human beings, or to speak of human beings as mindless prey and subordinates to corporations.
We create businesses, and over the long term we determine their growth or demise. A business is made up of people who gather together to make a greater whole with their lives, opinions, values and ideas, in much the same way microscopic slime spores can gather together to create something larger than themselves – a slug, and over time, a plant. And like the plant, which will eventually release new slime spores into the air, a healthy business yields bounty onto the people affected by it – it creates goods for them, jobs for them and, in the cases of Merck and Roussel UCLAF, a better quality of life.
I chose to examine HB Fuller, Merck and Roussel UCLAF in this piece because they are large corporate entities whose stories serve a dual purpose. They provide an ethical yardstick that can be applied on both the individual and the corporate level. Their products have affected the world in some way, for good or ill, and for matters of such scope it’s amazing that the lessons a person can learn from them are the same simple ones we can put into use every day.
From HB Fuller, you learn it is necessary to reconcile actions with values. If this is neglected, you damage yourself in addition to the many millions of people you and your brand interact with. From Roussel UCLAF you learn that people from different walks of life and different circumstances can band together to make a unified creative decision that satisfies individual ethics as well as collective social and corporate prerogatives. And Merck creatively demonstrates that making what looks like a blind ethical and social decision can be beneficial to a company over the long-term. All you need is a bit of foresight.