By Prabhakar Mundkur
When France qualified for the last FIFA World Cup through a handball, much to the disappointment of the Irish, it raised an important question on morality. The handball was visible in replays but then the referees did not notice it. The Irish were naturally very peeved to lose their place in the game because of a foul and requested the Federation to qualify them anyway. However, that did not happen. In later interviews, Henry Thiery admitted that it was a handball, but since the referee did not call it out, he kept going and it became a qualifying goal.
The incident raises two important questions. Are we relying on institutions (in this case the referees) to catch the wrongdoings in a game or is right and wrong a personal moral value that needs to be upheld?
From a corporate context
Institutions in the corporate context, for example, will decide how tough we are going to be on corporate governance. For instance, the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) manages to supervise violations on corporate governance. In fact, Uday Kotak leads the panel set up by the SEBI this year on corporate governance. My recent article on the Infosys saga invited many comments which suggested that performance was more important than morality in the case of Infosys. This meant that the young corporate India was willing to condone any wrongdoings (even if they were true) on the pretext that Infosys had performed well under Sikka. So, in this case, Narayana Murthy was the institution and the whistleblower, the real metaphorical referee, who became responsible for checking on the morality of Infosys. If he hadn’t objected, Infosys might have continued to win in spite of everything. Does this mean that we are outsourcing our morality to institutions?
He did what he had to do
Going back to the Henry Thierry example, he said that he did what he had to do, which was win the game for France. It was the job of the referees to catch any foul in the game. When we take such an attitude, are we, in fact, outsourcing our morality to institutions? If they catch the wrongdoing, well and good. If they don’t, I win the game anyway.
Let’s look at the following two statements.
- If I am a trader on the Bombay Stock exchange, my objective is to make money, by whatever means I can. It is the role of institutions to stop me. If they fail and a financial crisis happens, it is because the controlling institutions are badly designed. I sometimes wonder if this is how Harshad Mehta thought about what he did.
- If I am a builder, my objective is to make money by whatever means I can. I will break every municipal and other land laws to build a beautiful tower. If it means I am endangering the environment or the safety of the people who buy flats, it is the job of Real Estate Regulatory Authority to catch me.
If we propagate or condone thinking like this, the entire moral order of society will become outsourced, away from individuals and their internal controls to institutions.
Ethics beyond law
I recently pitched for a prestigious client with a campaign on digital marketing. We did not get the business, but a week later a version of the creative work we presented appeared on my creative director’s Facebook timeline. I naturally brought it up with the Marketing Director that there had been a case of plagiarisation. If I had never brought it up, maybe the prospect would have continued to use the plagiarised piece of creativity.
The important question this raises for corporate India is two-fold :
- Do we want our own sense of morality?
- Are we relying on institutions to catch us?
Lastly, there is the question of compliance with the law. What happens to cases outside the law? After all, not all unethical behaviour in companies will conflict necessarily with the law of the land. The same prospect I spoke about earlier, recently made a job offer to one of my staff who was on the pitch team. Technically there is little I can do about it. But is it right? I personally don’t think so. I think the least they could have done is asked me for permission or at least informed me. A long time ago I recruited a young executive from my client’s organisation. Since they were a client, I informed their CEO and asked whether they would allow me to recruit the person. It was only after getting their approval, that I proceeded to employ that person. There is a huge range of corporate behaviour and ethics that has nothing to do with law and compliance.
Corporate India needs to put its hand on its heart and ask themselves, which way they want to go.
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Attribution: Photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasvipul/3994769718/”>Jasvipul</a> via <a href=”https://visualhunt.com/re/20d0f6″>VisualHunt</a> / <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”> CC BY-NC-SA</a>