What if there was a group that corporations could join called the Society of Corporate Decency? What if they had a credo that they all lived by that sounded like this:
- We follow through on all of our promises.
- We don’t mince words or toss around doublespeak in an attempt to avoid doing the right thing.
- We don’t develop systems designed to frustrate customers or otherwise gyp customers out of what is rightfully theirs.
- We don’t try to get customers to agree to things that aren’t in their own best interests.
- We don’t try to hide the facts in small type or bury them on web pages that are hard to locate.
- We do everything we can to try and make ourselves available to our customers if they need help.
- We don’t try to profit off of technicalities that we ourselves devised and labeled “corporate policy.”
- Quite simply, we make a product or offer a service that has inherent value and we sell it at a fair price to our customers. Period.
- We don’t give money to political campaigns or otherwise try to influence elections so that we can curry favor with politicians or organizations and ultimately change policies in our favor.
- We don’t sell things that are bad for people’s health.
These all sound like things a decent company would agree to. But I just don’t know many that would. However, I firmly believe that doing this would be more profitable than the endless tactics companies invent to undermine people in the name of profits or cost-cutting. Who’s with me?
