Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Pretending to Be Ethical

A person can fake his behavior, but not his character. I should likely qualify that as being in reference to the short term, because character can be developed over longer periods of time - perspectives can change, and values can be adopted - but over shorter periods of time, a person has great difficulty pretending to be something he is not, going through the motions to create a false sense that his actions are driven by motives that are incompatible with his actual motivation.

It doesn't take an expert in "reading vocal tone, choice of words, and nonverbal elements of communication to have a sense that a person isn't being entirely honest. Most reasonably observant people can detect this, and few have the skills necessary to maintaining a facade. They will eventually slip, or crack, and go back to their true nature, such as it is ... generally when they have gotten what they wanted and no longer feel the need to maintain the charade.

The same is true of companies: it's not uncommon for a firm that has suffered from bad publicity to go out of its way to support charities or causes that are aligned against the very behaviors of which the firm has been accused and is often entirely guilty. When a petroleum firm has cut costs by neglecting security precautions and coated the shorelines with oil, it's a boon to environmental charities, but for a very short amount of time.

Companies show their true colors in far less dramatic and far more extensive ways: consider the quality of tech support for electronic products, the difficulty you encounter returning merchandise to stores, or the haggling you must do to redeem a CD at a bank. When you made the purchase, service was impeccable ... once they have your money in their hands, their behavior takes a turn, and should you want your money back, things get ugly.

It's in moments such as those that marketing slogans about customer service are put to the test and often fail. The values espoused in advertising and corporate documents reflect what the firm wants people to think, not what it actually is, nor how it actually conducts itself, nor how it has any intention of ever conducting itself.   The experience you have of a firm in everyday encounters demonstrates its actual values.

It's just as true of good companies as it is of bad ones: there are firms that are legendary for the quality of service they provide after the sale and merchants who simplify the return process, realizing that in order to maintain their reputation they must act in accordance to their professed values - giving up a little profit now means maintaining the trust and retaining the lifetime value of a customer. There are some who would suggest, and rightly so, that this behavior is maintained in order to nurture positive relations in hopes of getting your future business.  Even if that's true, it's not necessarily a bad thing. 

From an ethical perspective, a promise kept is a promise kept - even if there are ulterior motives for doing so. By some standards, it's more admirable to keep a promise if you gain no benefit from doing so - but it may be clutching at straws.   It's difficult enough simply to be good - and when someone behaves in a positive manner, it seems unjustly cynical to muckrake to unearth (or invent) a reason to be sour about it.

I also don't agree that companies should care about customers in a general way, "as human beings" or whatever phrase that is used to connote an ineffable and unconditional love for no particular reason. It's certainly a sentiment that customers, even those who seem to demand it for themselves, are unwilling to return. A company's love of customers is for the value they get from them, and a customer's love of a company is exactly the same.

I'd go further, to say that it would be unethical to suggest otherwise - and ethical to acknowledge the relationship such as it is: a commercial relationship, like a professional relationship, that has a given context and specific conditions: each gets what they expect of the other, with a clear sense of boundaries, utterly devoid of illusions or misconceptions, and both are happy with the arrangement.

This is also likely a critical difference between firms that are highly profitable for a short amount of time and those that earn a respectable (but not astronomical) profit and sustain themselves for a longer period of time: they do not pretend to be ethical, they simply are ethical, and not just in regard to their customers, but to their employees, investors, suppliers, partners, and communities.

This may be scratching at the surface of a deeper meditation - that ethics is not merely being true to one's nature, but having a good nature in the first place, such that their interaction with anyone they affect is either mutually beneficial, or at the very least not harmful. I'll think on this some more.

No comments:

Post a Comment