Interviste/Interview

Esclusiva RiservaEtica.org, incontra il Prof. Edward Freeman Professor of Business Administration Director, Olsson Center for Applied Ethics B.A., Duke University; Ph.D., Washington University Teorizzatore del "modello degli stakeholders" : l'impresa è il fulcro di una ruota e gli stakeholders sono al termine dei raggi della ruota...!!

1)Starting by quoting your stakeholders theory and stakeholders view of a company , how important are the “moral fundamentals” for the business of a company?

The most important questions that a company can ask are “what do we stand for” and ‘How do we make our stakeholders better off”. You need to build these “moral fundamentals” into the basic value proposition of the company. It is too easy to see CSR and Ethics and Stakeholder engagement as “add ons” not relevant to the basic value proposition. This is a mistake. You have to build these ideas into the basic fabric of the companyl.

2) As we move into 2007, after a great furore over ethics, ethics rules, ethics theories, and ethics strategies all over the world, (or at least in most of it), could you give RiservaEtica.org a definition of Business Ethics?

The fact that we see “business ethics” as a contradiction is the problem. We should see “business ethics’ as How do we put the best thinking about business and the best thinking about ethics, together. We can take the momentum generated by the scandals, and seize the opportunity to put “business” and “ethics” together once and for all. We can be the generation that makes business better.

3) In the absence of strong government forces, sustainable capitalism depends upon business’s success at self-regulating. This in turn depends upon devising and implementing experiments that respond to stakeholders' interests and competitive pressure. Could we think of a business as an ethical enterprise? If so, whose ethics should prevail?

We have to think of business an ethical enterprise. Capitalism is a system of social cooperation. It is how we create value and trade with each other. It is built on cooperation and the spirit of invention and innovation. Competition is a second order property in a relatively free society. We desperately need to realize this new story about business and capitalism.

4) In Italy, business ethics and csr are new topics for the business community. Actually, we are very far from what is happening in other countries like the United States or the U.K and Germany (as we recently realised at Humboldt University in Berlin); it seems that everybody has now discovered business ethics, and so for that reason everyone is entitled to talk about it. It’s strange, but during public conferences or forums those who start to discuss ethics topics first stress the fact that they have been dealing with BE for a long time, as a guarantee of what they are talking about. I guess that, as happens for other subjects of human culture or business, it’s time to highlight the basic skills of a Business Ethics professional. Could you define them, counting on your experiences as a professor and as one of the biggest names in the fied?

I’m not so high on seeing business ethics as a profession. I think we need to tell a new narrative about business. We have “business ethics” and “CSR” precisely because they are relative to the old narrative of seeing business as “dog eat dog” competition regardless of the consequences. If you put business and ethics together, at the level of the value proposition for a company…then you have built into every managers’ job, a concern with ethics and all the consequences of their decisions, economic, political, technological, social, etc…

5) What is an Ethics Officer?

An Ethics Officer should be responsible for leading a conversation about how business and ethics go together. She should be one of the top management team and a key advisor to the CEO. Too often ethics officers focus on compliance, not ethics on the enterprise level. That is a mistake, on my view. The ethics officer must take the lead on how to put business and ethics together at the level of the basic value proposition of the company.

6) RiservaEtica.org thinks that, in order to be successful, an Ethics & Compliance Officer must have a thorough working knowledge of the corporation’s business strategies, policies, standards, and risk areas. Could you quote some of the responsibilities of an ethics officer?

I think that my answer above gives my view on this. I’m not so interested in ethics and compliance, as I am in taking an “enterprise approach” to ethics. Thanks