Busted – oh we made a mistake!

There’s an increasing trend amongst corporates to operate their businesses with little regard for their environments – until they are brought to account. And when this happens there is very little in terms of an apology…rather we get the obvious spin and PR handling.

The issues with Toyota and their slow reaction to their vehicle recalls are well documented. It was only when the groundswell of disdain reached global proportions did the company commence clear and pro-active communication.

BP is yet to apologise for the oil spill off the US coast. Recently, there has been a lot of finger pointing at the rig-maker, Transocean.

Earlier this week, we had Google caught red-handed about their privacy breaches. First they denied (on 14 April) that they collected people’s payload data, but then when the concerns increase they fessed up (on 17 May) that indeed they did and that they simply ‘made a mistake’. Now they’ve also claimed to have deleted the data and confirmed by a third-party.

So what does aa large corporation do when it is caught out – claim it was simply a ‘mistake’!

Closer to home, we have that great Australian icon Golden Circle busted by the ACCC for misleading conduct by representing that it was ‘Proudly Australian Owned’. The release on 18th March this year received little publicity. So did the fact that the global food icon Heinz acquired Golden Circle in December 2008.

But for the following 15 months, Golden Circle kept the ‘Proudly Australian’ tag on its products capitalising on patriotic customers nation-wide.

If it wasn’t for our corporate watchdog this would have continued unabated. After it was busted, Golden Circle was forced to donate 800,000 cans of its products worth circa $1.8 million to charity.

Earlier this week, it had to commence advertising nationally to declare it was no longer Australian and that the cans were ‘incorrectly labelled’.

So when will corporations act with integrity? Here’s an interesting statistic: the majority of CEOs when asked to list key values for either themselves or their organisations come up with ‘integrity’.

Many business thought leaders promulgate that ‘integrity’ is not as much a value as a fundamental framework for a person or organisation to execute its other values.

The increased use of social media has increased the number of whistle blowers, watchdogs and critics. Consumers are a lot more vocal and pro-active. They are outspoken and bringing large corporates to account. As this trend increases, let’s hope corporations will be more transparent, pro-active and honest.