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How Would You Like a Business to Behave?
professorhojo asks: "These days on the 'net, it seems like a company can go from being regarded as a Good Citizen to Evildoer in a matter of hours (witness Yahoo!'s willingness to time and time again reinterpret their own privacy policy as it suits them and their advertisers). I am at the helm of a new software company and I want us to stand apart from the rest with rock solid ethics, and policies that put the user first, that won't change or waver at the behest of advertising money. What I want to know from you is simple:what are the essential things a company has to promise and stick to? More importantly, what things have companies done, which have made you do a double-take and totally reconsider doing business with them? Why am I asking this? Well, I believe that in the future, the ethics of a company will greatly impact on their bottom line. What's good for our customers is good for us, and customers will be drawn to us BECAUSE of it." It sounds good, but reality has a tendency of getting in the way of good ethics. What suggestions would you make to keep difficult choices from compromising the ethics you would like your company to embody?
Especially in advertising. You know how a company will compare their product to their competitors? One example comes to mind: Medicine. Tylenol, for years, compared the effectiveness of extra-strength Tylenol to regular-strength aspirin. Do your comparisons honestly.
Itemized features? The kind that have a column for yours, and a column for theirs? Shock your potential customers by putting in a few of the features they have but you don't, and put a "NO" in your column and a "YES" in theirs. This kind of advertising would make me move the despisometer from zero to "surprising respect".
I've gotten to where I automatically reject as dishonest EVERY ad I see on TV or read anywhere.
Honest advertising that was obviously honest would be such a huge change from the norm that you would definitely stand out in a positive way. (Think "Miracle on 34th Street")
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
#1: Don't lay off people when you're posting record profits.
#2: Don't get yourself a generic patent meant to serve as suing fodder years down the line instead of something being designed for a specific product/piece of S/W.
#3: Check out any downbeat memo at internalmemos.com or stories from fuckedcompany.com and try not to re-create them.
#4: Don't sacrifice experienced employees for cheap ones.
#5: Try not to have employees living under the constant threat of layoffs. Sticks instead of dangling carrots get annoying after a while.
Most of these points run into each other. A lot of them seem like common sense and can be boiled down to "Don't be a greedy bastard."
make the bug reporting/documenting process open, so that when we do run into a suspected bug we can do a quick search to find out if you know about it.
Nothing I hate more than doing a google search, not finding anything, then spending time to prepare a tested step by step description to repeat the bug, only to have a 2nd level support guy tell me that it's been in their private bugbase for months.
That's all they should do. Companies have no morals, and no ethics, unless they need it for public relations, or they are too small. Otherwise they get trampled by aggressive competition.
Sounds hopeless? Tired of the Microsofts and SCOs in this world? Well, the solution is to pressure government to pass better laws.
Having said that, there *are* different "personalities" of companies. For instance I would rather hang out with Apple (snobbish artist) than Microsoft (arrogant prick).
The personality I like to see in a software company are
1) minimalism/simplicity. keep your product lines simple. Maybe a "Pro" and "Standard" version (I have no idea what you are selling), but please no confusion in the product line. Keep the licensing model simple ($100 per employee for instance, or $100 per copy, or whatever).
2) Predicitability. Don't change anything without good reason and without warning the user base ahead of time (I'm thinking EULAs, support, end-of-life, phone numbers, web URLs, whatever).
3) Honesty. Don't try and sneak stuff into your EULAs when you think nobody is looking. Put your bug tracking on the web. Let your support folks communicate "off the cuff" ("Yeah I don't like the way that feature works either. I'll put a note in to have Bob look at it" rather than "Thanks for your comment. This issue has been noted")
4) Quality. Don't put out shitty products and charge $1000 for them (I run into this all the time with specialized software, example I just dealt with: the software that comes with the ColorVision Spyder monitor calibration device is a total piece of crap (at least the OS X version). Very confusing. Of course there is no way to write your own software without violating the EULA. Thanks guys.)
Good luck to you.
Well, I believe that in the future, the ethics of a company will greatly impact on their bottom line. What's good for our customers is good for us, and customers will be drawn to us BECAUSE of it.
I'm glad you said that, because "future" is the key word here. I believe that libertarian and Adam Smith economics can work, but they're based on the idea of people looking at what's in their own long-term best interest.
Every time you make a decision, ask yourself how it impacts your profits in the long run. If you maximize your long-term profits, you'll automatically -- invisible-hand style -- make the decision that best serves both you and your customers.
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
Just having that kind of a desire to be ethical is a step in the right direction. One thing to keep in mind is that when you are fixing bugs and implementing features it is plain as day to the customer weather your priority is yourself or your customer. A perfect example of this: We use an accounting package where I work that is licenced on a concurrent users model. We have run tight on our licences and people are regularly not able to log in. However getting another five seats is so expensive we can't get approval to buy more. We discovered that lots of people have the application open for long periods of time with out using it. Ever since we ran tight on licences we have been begging to have a feature in the software that will time out and log off a user if they are inactive for an hour or two. Is the company going to give us that feature? Of course not. There is no incentive because otherwise we will eventually have to break down and buy more licences. This leaves us feeling like we are being taken advantage of. We are loyal customers, we do beta testing for them, but they still pull this little stunt that makes them look money hungry. Just remember that your customers arn't all dumb, and your true priorities come through if you like it or not.
SCO.com uses Linux
Providing the consumer with something that they actually want and feel value for is something that can make a difference. In reference to you question, take the RIAA, SCO and Amazon as examples:
... also bought ..." feature. I don't mind paying a little extra than other Internet retailers (it's still cheaper than the local bookstore anyway).
Amazon aren't the cheapest place to buys books from. But I have remained a loyal customer due to the excellent "people who bought
However take the RIAA. Or the music industry in general. I feel quite strongly that the rise of napster and subsequent p2p networks is to do in part with the quality of the product. And the fall in music CD sales is also due to the quality of the product and not to do with p2p. Consumers aren't interested in pop music which is samey and generic and meaningless. A boy band in 2000 regurgitating the same cheesy song the Osmonds sang in the 70's isn't appealing to most. What the music industry today has done is instead of making music that some consumers will really enjoy (and some will detest) they have created a bland product which everyone finds inoffensive.
SCO have got people's backs up because they are appear to be trying to destroy Linux, which many people are passionate about. However I would argue that the reason they are probably currently the most unpopular company in the technology industry is because they don't have something of their own which they can sell to consumers but instead are taking advantage of others hard work.
My point is that if you create a good product and don't just adhere to the risk averse bean counter methodology then people will notice this. Promote what makes you stand out and if it's good enough people will love you.
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
I'm sure this isn't the ONLY reason you want to be ethical, but it's a little disconcerting that you cite it as your main one. I'm not saying I'm the MOST ethical person out there, but I do believe in an absolute standard for what is right and wrong, and I believe that a person should adhere to those standards regardless of wether it makes more or less money.
I do believe that the ethics of a company will have an impact on its bottom line. However, at times you may be tempted to suspect that good ethics are having a negative impact. It's at those times when, if your ethics are fundamentally based on economics rather than unshakeable principles of what is good and evil, you may lose your way.
www.clarke.ca
o DON'T take advantage of salaried workers. The tendency is to overwork them. Make sure all their hard work is appreciated.
The extension to this is that if you must push your employees hard, then you need to compensate/reward them properly. Some examples of ways to reward employees were discussed in this earlier Slashdot thread (re: Christmas bonuses).
As well as giving performance bonuses (and sometimes gifts as tokens of appreciation), at the request of some of my full-time employees I've also given them the option of banking overtime hours (versus just being paid straight overtime). An employee banks his/her hours at the overtime rate, then we calculate the corresponding hours that he/she will take off (at a time that is mutually beneficial for him/her and me). This may be similar to what Jellybob mentioned in his earlier post.
Of course, this type of time/wage manipulation may not be legal in some cities/states/provinces/countries. I had to get a variance from the labour relations board to do this legally. but, everyone came on board wit hthe idea and it's working for us. It works particularly well for my casual employees. They get more hours by filling in when the full-timers are on their banked time off.
Anyway, the point that I started off making is to treat the employees right. Happy employees make efficient employees. Efficient employees make my business more profitable. I complete the circle by "sharing the wealth" and making my emplyees happy.
D.
I think it's pretty well agreed upon that e.g. spewing toxic waste everywhere and allowing your customers to die due to your negligence is PROBABLY a pretty unethical thing for a company to do. There aren't really any societies that look DOWN upon a company being well-behaved at the expense of profit. (Except maybe the U.S.) The law doesn't help much when companies can flout it with vast legal dept. funds. and get around it by globalizing and relocating operations to more acquiescent world regions.
On the other hand, people are stupid enough that the Y2K bug happened.
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