Friday, 23 March 2007

Is the criminal activity of the banks employees as bad that of the Banks?

I got round to watching the whistleblower programme on banks last night (aren't PVR hard drive recorders fantastic, I can now have a huge archive of programmes I never get to watch without having to fill the shelves full of unlabelled video tapes and DVD's)
The thing that struck me wasn't the content of the programme. It came as no surprise whatsoever that the organisation employed a minority of individuals that broke the rules or took part in criminal activity or bent the rules for personal gain. It didn't even surprise me that the perpetrators were so willing to talk, to an almost complete stranger, about what they do. Values and beliefs are a weird and wonderful thing. These people intrinsically know they were breaking the rules, yet still felt ok to both do it and talk about it. Why is that? Essentially it comes down to their own value set and what they believe is right wrong good bad or just down right criminal. My good friend and mentor Dr. Wyatt Woodsmall says "from whatever value system you live from, all other systems seem at best dull and boring, at worst, criminal and insane". The investigative reporter didn't even need to agree with her victims to get them to open up. Their value system was so strong that not disagreeing or judging their activity was enough for them to assume the reporter shared their value system! Why wouldn't they? After all there's nothing wrong with a bit of innocent corruption, is there?
As a regular "morality panelist" on BBC local radio it always makes me chuckle when the same person who thinks it's fair game to accidently get away with not paying for a DVD player from Tesco's would condemn "real criminals" to 20 years of hard labour.
What did surprise me, a little, is that the senior exec, when interviewed could not believe that there were people in her org that were clearly not living the values of the Bank.
It should come as no surprise really beliefs and values are capable of blinkering all but the most aware. There are few companies that do little more than pay lip service to owning and staying accountable for their culture, possibly because they don't know how!
Come up with a nice set of values that your customer's want to hear, plaster the words all over your marketing collateral and expect the rest of the company to toe the company line. That should do the trick, shouldn't it?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting to know.