Soul-searching in the corporate world

I'm just beginning a book on "saving the corporate soul." I've heard encouraging remarks from many of you to my periodic laments on the power of the corporation and its lack of public accountability. Others of you, on the contrary, tell me to give up my notion that the corporation has a soul at all. It's a beast, a machine, beyond redemption. Maybe you critics have goaded me on to write this book even more than the positive nudges.

Now underway, I'm finding no easy answers. Early in the week I interviewed Arthur Brief, a professor of organizational behavior at Tulane University's business school. He's been studying ethics and leadership among corporate workers for nearly three decades. What does he think about the personal values in the corporate environment? "They don't make a damned bit of difference," says Brief succinctly (sorry for the big word...couldn't use "briefly").

In one study, he found that 47% of nearly 400 executives surveyed were willing to commit fraud by understating write-offs that would cut into their companies' profits. Those numbers should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the business pages recently: Xerox, GlobalCrossing, Computer Associates (do I even have to note Enron and Arthur Andersen?). Even more disturbing is a trend Professor Brief found about the choices employees make in an effort to please their bosses: "People in subordinate roles will comply with their superiors even when that includes wrongdoing that goes against their individual moral code."

On the other side of the coin, I'm meeting some remarkable people who are putting their consciences ahead of profits. One executive I interviewed resigned his post as president of one of Enron's affiliates in 1995 for all the same reasons that finally undid the company in 2001. He exposed these corrupt conflicts of interest to top Enron executives, including then-chairman Kenneth Lay. Once the executive determined that Enron officers had no desire to change their policies, he quit. Over the next four years he teamed up with a colleague to build one of the most successful energy companies in the U.S., and he built the company on the very principles that he found absent at Enron: transparency and honesty to employees, investors, and customers.

This week I also interviewed a founder of the Odwalla juice company. He told me with great lament how the founders and employees lost majority control of the company after a crisis forced Odwalla into raising money from outside investors. The investors then forced him out as chairman and sold the company to Coca-Cola. Learning from his painful lesson, this creative entrepreneur is now pioneering new cooperative equity structures with a $50 million annual revenue organic food company that will enable suppliers and customers to keep ownership control.

Yes, many corporate workers feel dispirited, crushed by company behavior marked by greed, selfishness, and the quest for profit at any cost. They are looking for a new vision, a path to save the corporate soul. And just maybe their own.

DAVID BATSTONE is executive editor of Sojourners.

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