Reading Jim Hancock’s post, Enron: Innovation Corrupted, brought to mind a series of events I experienced as the whole Enron debacle unfolded. I was senior consultant, responsible for the development of the firm’s knowledge and practices in the area of leadership. As the Enron scandal emerged so did a host of others: MCIWorldcom, Global Crossing, Martha Stewart. When our leadership group met to discuss these situations, we decided to assign interns to contact each of these companies and ask for a copy of their statement of company purpose and values.
We were blown away by the responses…or lack thereof. We could not get to first base with any of the companies. Calls and emails were never returned. I imagine they were all feeling under siege. So we went to Plan B and began scouring corporate websites. For Enron, ironically, we found the company published a document of about 40 pages on corporate responsibility just as the ugliness was being exposed. What a disconnect!
Several weeks passed with no response from MCIWorldcom. Then we received a terse email from deep in the bowels of public relations that simply said:
“To whom it may concern: MCIWorldcom does not have any values.”
Thinking about this stunning reply, it occurred to me that companies need to go beyond talking about values. In fact, corporate values are really not the most significant things about a company. What’s more important is the worldview of a company’s leaders. An individual’s worldview is that person’s core belief system. It reflects what he actually believes, not merely says, about life, truth, right, wrong, the significance of human beings, God, and everything else (we’ve written extensively on worldview at InsideWork). In the case of these companies, it wasn’t their values that finally came through, but their real belief systems — their worldviews. In the end we all act out of our deeply-held beliefs more than our stated values.
Corporate values are really not the most significant things about a company.
In spite of the fact that two key figures in Enron and MCIWorldcom — Kenneth Lay and Bernard Ebbers — openly professed to be Christians, I wonder if their worldviews were really guided by and accountable to the virtues of a biblical worldview? Were they accountable by something true, something bigger, something outside themselves or were they the sole measure of their own values, holding them like beads on a necklace they could choose to wear or not?
These are cautionary tales for people who claim to follow God in the marketplace. The higher up the ladder we ascend, and the more complicated the deals we make, the less likely it is our colleagues and employees will challenge the underlying assumptions on which we base decisions — the decisions that are shaped by and reveal our true worldviews regardless of what we claim about our values.
