c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The unfolding ethical drama at Hewlett-Packard _ top officers using questionable and perhaps illegal methods to spy on directors, employees and reporters _ raises an obvious question: “What were they thinking?”

Could plugging a leak in board secrecy be so important as to warrant undermining morale and future ethical conduct throughout the company, and to court possible criminal charges? Plus lost jobs? Plus lost trust within top leadership?

The answer, it seems from afar, is they were tacitly relying on the speeding motorist’s defense: “I was just keeping up with traffic.”

In a business environment guided by maxims such as “business is war” and “buyer beware,” why not push the boundaries of ethical behavior? Everyone else is.

In a social context where cheating is taken for granted and the only failure is getting caught, trespassing on normal standards is easy to justify.

When the government spies on citizens and views candor as weak, plugging leaks to prevent public scrutiny of corporate life can seem worth the potential damage to investors’ confidence.

When the onion of truth is peeled grudgingly in most legal settings, responding piecemeal to an ethical crisis can seem prudent.

When religious custodians of morality are preoccupied with bedroom behavior and in-house squabbles, who has the pulpit to provide basic ethical instruction?

In other words, top executives at Hewlett-Packard probably weren’t thinking about ethics. They were playing the everyday game by society’s emerging rules.

They weren’t thinking long term. As with corporate strategies designed to shore up today’s stock price at tomorrow’s expense, they weren’t looking down the road to a time when a company culture grounded in secrecy and spying would demolish trust, stifle creativity and risk-taking, and make further cheating easier to undertake.

In apparently not thinking outside their immediate self-interest, H-P executives weren’t imagining the impact their behavior might have on the communities in which their children make decisions about plagiarizing assignments, partners make decisions about fidelity, and vendors make decisions about fair pricing and honoring contracts.

Nor did executives seem concerned about what everyone should know by now: truth does eventually come out. When banks, investors and customers feel hoodwinked, they fire back with financial penalties. Trust lost, like a customer lost, can be expensive to regain. People know, people talk. Candor is much better strategy than secrecy.

And yet, how far outside the norm was their behavior? It’s the rare company that worries about the working conditions of those who make their sneakers or harvest their coffee beans. Now that technology makes it possible to track computer keystrokes, cell phone locations, Web sites visited and facilities accessed, closely monitoring employees’ behavior is considered wise management. Extending that to board members, as H-P did, seems politically foolish, but not ethically unusual.

Two aspects of the Hewlett-Packard situation strike me as critical.

One is how casual both management and directors seemed about trust. The director who initiated this episode by leaking secret information from board deliberations _ itself a possible legal violation, an attorney tells me _ seems as culpable as those who stopped at nothing to root him out. I don’t see how any leadership group can function without a culture of trust.

Second, while I don’t see into every church’s doors, I sense that this episode is seen as fodder for the business section, not the Sunday sermon. If religious leaders won’t talk about corporate ethics, why should anyone?

I think it is time we put aside our usual moralizing on sexuality and got down to basics like honesty, trust and respect.

KRE/JL END EHRICH

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

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