Jan

8

On the corporate morality thread, I can offer some experience of the company I first worked for, a large manufacturing business. The number one priority ahead of profits, customer service, quality or value was safety for the employees. We will not injure our employees, and there was zero tolerance on this issue. The quickest way for a manager to lose his job was lax safety practices. And in fact some of the work around machinery was dangerous. Every meeting started and ended with reports and progress on safety. It is the morally right thing and does not conflict with good business. Safety at work or anywhere else is fundamental. Secondly, this focus attracted a culture of employees who cared not just about safety but about the other things that make a business successful, productivity, investment in new ideas, costumers and creating value. I would predict that companies with good safety records internally have equally good performance externally for customers and shareholders, and the opposite.

Jeff Watson writes:

My grandfather had another indicator of the condition of a company. Drive by the place and look at the parking lot. If it's full of older cars, junky cars, it's probably not a good place to work for and probably is a poor credit risk. On the other hand, if a parking lot is full of shiny new cars, it's probably a better place to work and probably has better financials and business.

David Lilienfeld writes:

I don't doubt the morality in corporate behavior. In the pharmaceutical industry there is lots of concern about patient safety. There are two schools of thought about why: The first is that the companies are enlightened and accept George Merck's "Do well by the patient, and you will do well by the society." The second is "A dead patient doesn't buy drugs."

My observation is that while the industry has a sincere interest in patient safety, it can also deceivingly discounts that safety in preference to efficacy, which is perceived to be the reason drugs gets approved. I don't think this is a conscious effort at deceit. That doesn't make it any less real. Many of the leading pharma houses have come to accept that and have tried to design in fail safe safety mechanisms into the approval process. It will take another 4-5 years to see if they are having their intended effects.


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