Vulnerabilities
For successes, there are significant limitations to Lockheed
Martin’s approach to ethics. Measured against its own standards and those of the contemporary ethics industry, Lockheed Martin’s program shines. Measured against the expectations of the broader culture, however, the program falls short. There is a significant gap between how corporate America judges itself and how its ideas about values and integrity play out in the larger culture. Lockheed Martin’s ethics program, for all its excellent qualities, illustrates that gap. One consequence of this gap is that the corporation’s quest to be seen as an active force for good in American life remains, at best, incomplete. Another consequence is that the company’s program is better at responding to the problems of the past than to the problems of the future. Lockheed Martin’s ethics program addresses people, but it does not address systems. The exclusive emphasis on lived individual experience is appealing and in many ways effective. But the impact of a corporation like Lockheed Martin is not simply the accretion of millions of acts of fundamental decency undertaken by workers. It is also the impact of the corporation as a very powerful organization, or, rather, as a collection of very powerful organizations. Lockheed Martin’s program is innovative in reaching the employees, but that is not enough. Innovation for innovation, evil will eventually outflank virtue. It thrives not in the isolated human heart, but in the very spirit of collective enterprise that corporations value.
The gaps in the program are most apparent when it is examined in the light of the long-standing expectations in American life regarding corporate behavior. When it comes to addressing the moral character of the corporation’s leaders, the conduct of the corporation toward its customers and competitors, the company’s treatment of its employees, its impact on its various communities, and the ethical considerations regarding profit within its industry, Lockheed Martin’s programs leave major questions untouched. By drawing strict boundaries around their ethics enterprises, American corporations risk losing the public credibility that they are working so hard to maintain.
One way to look at this is to ask of Lockheed Martin’s program a series of simple questions that grow out of the historical conceptions of business ethics that I discussed in chapter:
• Does the program specifically and effectively address the dangers of unethical leadership, of possible misbehavior among the corporation’s most senior executives?
• Does the program take into account the dangers of organizational behavior, as well as individual misdeeds?
• Does the program convincingly address the needs and concerns of rank-and-file employees of the corporation?
• Does the program convincingly tackle the full range of issues involved in assessing the corporation’s ultimate impact on its local, regional, national, and global communities?
The answers to these questions suggest that Lockheed Martin’s program fails to go as far as it could, creating potential areas of vulnerability for the future.
