To Trust or Not to Trust, That Is the Question
by Miki Saxon
The Hart Research Associates poll showed that top executives are even more disliked than politicians. … The vast majority of potential jurors see corporate CEOs as greedy and willing to break the law.” —LA Times, 11/10/09
It’s a sad day when business leaders are lower on the trust pole than politicians. Actually, I didn’t think any group could be rated lower than politicians.
The saddest part is that the great majority of men and women running small, medium and even large companies don’t lie, cheat or steal; they aren’t particularly greedy and they don’t break the law.
The problem is that many of those who do fit the profile, and there are plenty, run high profile companies in the same or related industry—think financial services and autos to name two glaring examples.
I think part of what’s going on is the spread of the lemming mentality.
You see it a lot in the venture world. During the internet boom no matter how good your business plan if it wasn’t .com you could pretty much forget getting funded. These days the magic markets are green/clean tech, healthcare and mobile anything. In other words, if one jumps off a cliff all the rest will follow.
I have a friend who says that the more expensive the suit the lower his initial trust level; I might agree except that I’m sure that the folks wearing them are aware of the prejudice. Therefore, I have to believe that they are either arrogant enough to believe we are all dumb/disinterested/ignorant not to notice or they just don’t give a damn.
The real question in all this is what are we going to do about it?
Are we going to wring our collective hands, tar all business with the same brush, lament the mentality that drives our distrust and then let it all sink back into the muck when the economy turns around—out of sight, out of mind?
Or are we going to get active, demand better accountability, force business leaders to toe an ethical line and avoid our normal memory loss?
Image credit: powerbooktrance on flickr
November 17th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Miki – This is a very interesting post. I also just made a post on a similar topic and in it pointed out why we, as private citizens and even stockholders, have little say in the way business, especially Big Business, operates.
Other than demanding government intervention, which is a tough sell in Congress right now, there is virtually nothing that we as private citizens can do to “…force business leaders to toe an ethical line…”
Big businesses are controlled by, and feed off, other big businesses–and the government must bow to the will of big business, if they want the big campaign money it takes to win today.
I’m afraid it’s going to take more than a few “tea parties” to make any major changes in the way our system currently works.
November 17th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Hi Bob, I’m not really comfortable tarring all of Big Business with the same brush, except maybe Wall Street and even there it probably isn’t 100%. My unscientific guess is that greed is just as prevalent in small and micro biz, but isn’t noticed because it doesn’t have the same impact. And cynic that I am, I see no difference between Christian greed, atheist greed or any of the variations in-between.
We as private citizens could do a lot more by voting with our feet and not patronizing companies whose ethics offend us, but that would be inconvenient and few Americans are willing to be inconvenienced. They prefer to stand back and let other fix whatever, kind of a mental NIMBY attitude.
As to the politicians, I’ve written my thought on them frequently, but this post best sums my up thoughts.
The tea parties are a joke; just watch those same people scream when programs are cut from their kids’ schools, there are potholes in their streets and the cops don’t show up fast enough.
As long as ideology trumps common sense and elections run on money nothing will change. But screwed up s it is, I haven’t seen a different system for which I’d trade.