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 The
past year has also seen management teams renew their focus on the
issue of corporate responsibility. Professor Michael Novak, holder
of the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Philosophy
at the American Enterprise Institute, keenly spoke on this issue
at last year’s President’s Economic Forum:
"The business corporation
is the strategically central institution of social justice. If
it fails to meet its moral responsibilities, the odds against the
rest of society doing so shrink to next to zero... On the other
side, when corporations go badly, human misery increases. If human
conditions at work are poor, the rest of life tends to sour with
it. That's why building a good corporation is a noble human calling.
It is a calling heavily weighted with moral obligations."
Sadly, too many corporations have failed to conduct their business
in the best interests of shareholders, and the result has been
widespread public mistrust of corporations. At the core of this
problem is a lack of ethics—innate qualities such as integrity,
discipline, hard work and individualism that supply the backbone
of our economy. This type of corporate character has always been
difficult to legislate, but it must be practiced. Professor Novak also spoke eloquently about the need for perpetual
trust in corporate America:
"When the American people
can't trust a company's financial report, they won't invest in
that company. It's as simple as that. You may not be able to see
"trust," but it's as real as a huge loss on the stock
market… In the daily life of a capitalist system, things of
the spirit - like trust - are more real than money." |
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