Resumo de Ethics Lessons From Hp - Rushworth M. Kidder

What's going on at Hewlett-Packard? Strange machinations, indeed. True, the troubles at the Silicon Valley computer maker don't hold a candle to the dismal failings at Enron, Tyco, or WorldCom. The HP story won't be another Arthur Andersen, where a grand corporate icon collapses into ashes. It won't even be another Martha Stewart, where a popular celebrity plummets into public disgrace.But it may be the most significant corporate ethics story of the year, simply because it crosses two important moral watersheds. The first has to do with ethics and law. In the coming weeks, as many as half a dozen federal, state, and in-house HP committees will begin probing HP. They'll all ask the same question: Was there anything illegal in the way that corporate directors and officers -- including former board chair Patricia Dunn, who resigned last Friday, and CEO Mark Hurd, who took over as chair -- investigated leaks of sensitive information to the press? The answer may well be no. To be sure, HP approved the use of pretexting, or assuming false identities to gain information, but investigators in a number of states are legally allowed to do just that. It also included the embedding of an electronic tracer in an email as a way to track later forwardings of the message, a relatively new technology about which the law appears unclear. Other techniques used by HP -- tailing and photographing individuals on the street, accessing public information on the Web, or throwing journalists off course with bogus information -- are standard operating procedure for investigators, breaking no laws. Yes, sending spies disguised as cleaning staff into media newsrooms may break trespassing laws, but the mere act of discussing whether or not to do it, which apparently was as far as it went at HP, has free-speech protection under the First Amendment. But that's not the point. Legal or illegal, most people see this list of things as somewhere between morally dubious and flat-out wrong. The real questions that the probers need to ask are not about law but about core moral values. Were the actions at HP genuinely responsible? Were they honest and aboveboard? Did they show respect by board members for one another, for the company, and for the public? Did they express the highest kind of fairness? Would HP's corporate leaders feel comfortable having someone else -- journalists, for instance -- do to them what they did to others? If actions like these became the standard of best practice in every firm across America, would the business community be improved or diminished? The point: Even if the lawyers never lay a glove on the company, it won't emerge unscathed. And that's the first thing that makes this case so significant. However it turns out, it already has given us a powerful object lesson to resist that tired old mantra of business cynicism, "If it ain't illegal, it must be ethical." It helps prove, in other words, that unethical activity can damage a corporation's most important asset -- its reputation -- just as powerfully as illegal activity.The second reason this case is so significant has to do with compliance. It is clear now that businesses trying to preserve reputations can't count on mere legal compliance to do it for them. In recent years, and especially in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, corporations have lunged toward compliance, sometimes at the expense of values-based ethics programs. But compliance, almost by definition, only picks up what's illegal. If HP's actions were lawful or even gray, no amount of compliance ever could have prevented them. Compliance is no substitute for a clear sense of conscience and character. Only a corporate culture deliberately committed to integrity and a strong moral compass can make it unconscionable for corporate leaders even to contemplate doing the things HP did.To his credit, Mr. Hurd is seeking reform. At his press conference last Friday, he included the four key elements of any authennderstanding that the actions were wrong, making clear how serious the actions were, asking forgiveness for failure, and promising never to do it again. It was both a personal and a corporate apology, and he deserves some running room to put it into practice.But in the end, only one thing can make such reforms stick. Dismissing board members, firing executives, even building in more ethics training -- those aren't enough. It is only by addressing not the individuals but the entire ethical culture that reform has a hope of taking hold. Corporate cultures are tricky things. They survive beyond the people who currently inhabit them. They persist through narratives -- good ones like the story of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard working in a Palo Alto garage with $538 in capital to invent an audio oscillator, or bad ones like the tale unfolding at HP this week. And they range all the way from cultures of corruption -- Enron and its ilk -- to the cultures of integrity often found in Fortune's annual "100 Best Companies to Work For.HP has let itself get bumped down a few notches in that range. Its task, whatever the upcoming probes find, is nothing short of a wholesale repurposing of its leadership around one goal: creating and maintaining a first-in-class culture of integrity

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