In the words of William Shakespeare: “We are all bastards.”
I think late December must be the best season to air dirty laundry: It’s harder to see in these dark days. Winter solstice is here. The sun is at its nadir. What better time to admit our moral failings and try to shine a faint Christmas light on them?
Many business people I know don’t often include “moral” and “business” in the same sentence. After all, with executive responsibility comes tough decisions, usually quite unavoidable ones, that could be construed, from time to time, as morally wrong. You could drive yourself mental.
Everything from drilling sour-gas wells to creating Internet encryption software comes with an ethical dilemma. Everyone wants cheap gas, but no one wants flaring. Everyone wants encryption security for their Internet transactions, but no one wants terrorists using it for their own purposes. We’re torn, and at this time of year, we can admit it.
Let’s face the fact that there is probably a little bit of Henry F. Potter, the unscrupulous magnate of It’s a Wonderful Life, in all of us. And since we can’t purge the Grinchiness unless we recognize its presence, let’s expose our inner Scrooges to the chill, open air.
At this time of year, Christians celebrate the birth of a child who grows up to save them from their evil deeds. Other people generally focus on “giving” and “family.” But no matter which mode we might be in right now, greed and self-interest are nominally out of favour – for the next couple of weeks anyway. (After the new year’s hangovers have worn off, we can get back to the dirty backstabbing, but until then, let’s pretend we all love each other, OK?)
So, in the true spirit of Christmas, I want to look at some of the awful things we business people have done to each other this year.
The Enron fiasco takes the Christmas cake. After all, Enron is to the NYSE what Bre-X was to the CDNX: a big confidence-shaker.
What disturbs me more than anything about this is that Enron directors may well have been acting within legal limits while they loaded up on unmanageable off-balance-sheet debt. At least with Bre-X, someone was breaking the law when samples were salted.
But legal deception is twice as scary as the criminal kind. And that’s why experts are insisting on tighter securities regulations for the emerging free-market energy sector.
Unfortunately for all of us, more regulation is the lesser of two evils: more red tape is neither conducive to competition nor efficiency. And all the enforced regulations in the world won’t make us more honest, just less deceptive.
Which brings up my point: The less trustworthy we are, the less free are our markets. And unfortunately, many of us are not very trustworthy.
I’m not pointing fingers at Enron. I’m simply using the Enron fiasco as an example of where so many of us fail. We think that because we can get away with things, they must be right.
A year ago, more than 30 million people were essentially freely stealing music from artists via Napster. I was one of them.
But only 30 per cent of us, in one poll, acknowledged the ethically troubling aspect of the music-exchange service – that musicians were not being compensated for their work.
Another example: I met an old friend of my wife’s recently, who now works for an investment firm, and his role is to seek “loopholes” in executive contracts – thus making the company in question more attractive for takeovers. In essence, in his own words, his job is to test the limits of those contracts.
These examples signal a trend that frightens me. With such predatory attitudes, all business transactions are at serious risk of losing the important spirit of the law.
Don’t loophole minersand music thieves destroy goodwill?
Another ready, recent example is that of the Canadian brain drain. Much ado has been made, in the National Post in particular, of the fact that Canada’s steep taxes make our country an unattractive place for highly skilled workers to do business, especially researchers, doctors, and the like.
The Post has derided the Canadian government for its taxation policies.
But this attack on taxes, while noble, is misguided rage. Canada pays a generous percentage of domestic university education (exceeding 50 per cent), only to have many of those graduates take this gift (from Canadian taxpayers) overseas or down south. Surely, this could be interpreted as legal theft, like Napster.
So, you don’t have be a robber to be a thief. And there is no shortage of white-collar thieves around, including me.
But this is Christmas. Surely there is light in the darkness.
At a recent news conference in Calgary, three neuroscientists were paraded before the press, each living proof of some of the brains coming back up the drain. While one talked of the money as an incentive and another spoke of research opportunities, Dr. John Wong impressed me most when he spoke of the obligation he felt toward this country for giving him his solid medical education.
With such attitudes, maybe we won’t have to regulate our students to stay home. With Wong’s attitude, our students will remain competitive, and our system open to all.
But most of all, in Wong’s giving spirit, there is hope for peace on earth, goodwill to (wo)men.
Now I’d better erase those files from my hard drive, and go buy some CDs. Merry New Year.
