One area I’m particularly interested in is the disconnect between many organizations’ lobbying/government affairs efforts (and sometimes their legal stances) with their brand/corporate citizenship efforts. I understand that some of these are completely unintentional — yet diametrically opposed.

You might enjoy the book Value Shift, in which Lynn Sharpe Paine outlines the 7 functions necessary for organizations to keep their promises and thus actually be responsible moral actors as a whole: 1) Being able to gauge the capability to fulfill a promise, 2) keeping track of promises and transferring them across the organization, 3) getting cooperation from other parts of the organization to deliver, 4) having all individuals be promise-keepers, 5) having promises seen as valid reasons in decision-making, 6) educating individuals into the system of promise-keeping, 7) having systems to correct when promises are broken. Clearly most of these are not present and are not very strong in most organizations — and even more important, these functions are not often associated with promise-keeping/integrity and so seem like “add-ons”.

Again, thanks for insightful post.

To take a simple but important example: we can no longer trust the airlines to deliver us to our destinations on time, because they have continued to cut personnel, gates, and maintenance expenditures that contribute to delays that are the airlines’ fault, but that they try to excuse.

On our recent trip to California, two of the four segments were delayed because either 1) they had to taxi to find an open gate, and 2) they had to maintenance work (do work on the brakes) that should have been done at a scheduled time rather than at unscheduled one. I’ve also had flights cancelled because the “crew couldn’t be found.” I can only imagine what would happen to me if one of my MBA classes had to be cancelled because my students couldn’t find me!

Aneil