Why do ethics matter? | Shefali Roy | TEDxOxbridge

I was told I have to stand in the dot when I came in here earlier they said you have to come down these stairs and you do your thing and then you should go up those stairs and I tend as a speaker when I train or when I do public speaking to walk around a bit and move my hands a lot and so I said I can't move out of the dot I was like no you can't and then I got a look which was you're talking about ethics and compliance so I can't you just comply and just you know just stand in the dots so I'm going to stand in the dot thank you very much for inviting me to speak I know you've had a long day and ethics I think is the last thing perhaps that you want to talk about at this really sort of a lovely day of interesting talks variation of conversation and I'm going to ask you things about what is your personal ethics how do you value morality how do you think about your value system when you work for work for an organization that's unethical when you work for an organization that does things in a nefarious way and so it's a bit heavy for a Sunday night so we're going to try and make it a bit lighter so that you you enjoy it a bit but I am are going to ask you some questions and I want you to think about certain things in a certain way as I was introduced I've worked across the world and I've worked in various sectors and industries and I've had a lot of fun doing it and I've been in compliance for a very long time for those of you who are looking for jobs in a couple of weeks and months for those of you are in business school I think our friends from Judge are here as well and various academics and students and sort of audience members around around town it is something that affects you every day actually in your life in your work in how you interact with your colleagues with your friends and and as a job it's a very tough job I wouldn't say it's easy I wouldn't say it's something that I would encourage you all to do because it questions you a loss it sometimes puts you in a corner no one likes you in an organization I've been called a handbrake I've been called a stop sign I wouldn't put that on your CV I put that once on my CV and they didn't like it very much but I thought but that's what I've been called that's my job title it wasn't a pleasant day but that was what it was so it's a sort of feel that not every like sand not every thinks about but it happens all the time in business and so what we're going to do is relate ethics and relate compliance and governance to your lives and to your business lives as it happened the next couple of years in months and and however long you have your career I once went for a job and I thought I'll tell you this as an anecdote many many moons ago after I worked at Goldman's I was asked interview for a job in Geneva and I was flown over there and it was fantastic and it was a really lovely small little Swiss bank and they said to me listen we would love for you to come here and show our clients how to loan the money and I said I think you mean anti-money rangering and he said no I would love for you to show our clients how to loan the money because they have a ton of it and they don't appear tax and no one wants to know about it and so I'm going to ask you to help them launder it and you know I'll tell you I'll tell you very honestly I was going to be paid a lot of money a lot of money to do this job and I thought at the time if I did it if I took it I would never have to work again after I turned 13 and so it was an incredibly attractive offer and I never of course I never took it but I taught at the time there's a huge pot of money right here and then this jail and you know it's tough to top gig but I I don't look good in orange and as I said these days orange is not the new black but it was at a time and I thought it can't be that this is how it's done it can't be that this is how we think about business and ethics so easily and so effortlessly as breaching ethics or breaching laws and making people loan the money it can't be this easy but you know what it is and so a handful of the stories I tell you today are things that either happened to me or some of my friends who are in industry similar to mine or in rules or rule a jobs that are similar to mine but it happens all the time and so when you go out in the world and you think about your jobs if you guys start your own companies if you are working for people if you're cofounders if you're going to employ people think about that think about how does ethics factor into your decision making into your organizations into how you build your teams into how you recruit when you hear of incredible start-up thinking well she might not get any money because she's brown she's Indian you know she's a techie she's a data scientist and no VC on the planet is going to give you money if you've got to fill in 148 applications and no one's giving you any money for those things how does ethics and morality and unconscious bias work in that situation what happens to you as an individual your development your culture how do you integrate that into your organization's and ethics actually is all part of that so we'll talk a little bit about that and I thought the first thing you'll do is say what is ethics it's a very simple definition it's the moral behaviors that governed it's the moral principles that govern a person's behavior and it sounds so simple and so when you translate it into your corporations it things like rights and wrongs it's things like values it seems like codes of conduct or standards it's the thing which I hate calling which is policies and procedures whenever you hear policies and procedures it makes my skin crawl because it's just such a boring name for something that's so valuable to an organization but that's what it was so when your compliance team or when you get and you start a new job and they say to you can you please your compliance training the amount of groans I hear unbelievable I've had some people say to me in an organization if you do my compliance train for me I'd really appreciate it and I said but you know I wrote it for you to do because you're a new employee and you're someone who has to understand the values of our organization so it is something that happens all the time when you join a new company in any facet whether you're in pharmaceuticals or technology or finance or or any sort of industry you will be doing this you will be making sure that you do ethics training you do compliance training and you have a governance program and so therefore why does ethics matter why is it important and I have heard in the last couple of weeks and these are things that I pulled up from slides and and newspaper articles and I thought I'll show you something like this the Panama papers all of you have heard of the Panama papers the Panama papers you know arguably one could say well they were perfectly legal they didn't do anything wrong arguably and then other people say but you evaded tax and uilleann you know you had all these shell accounts and all these shell companies and so you didn't pay a bazillion tax amounts of tax that you were meant to pay but it's perfectly legal of what they did they didn't do anything wrong but morally a lot of people have so many things to say about it so many things to argue about it and you have things like Fox for those of you who are in media or keeping up in media Fox News was having heaps of scandals with women being sexually harassed and they were it was perennial so - every second week there was something coming out and then a handful of the men who were unfortunately harassing these women were asked to that girl and I read some really bizarre stat the other day which said that about 75 million dollars was paid out to settle all these cases and off the 75 million 20 million was paid to the women and 55 was paid to the men who harassed them that's a bit of a weird stat I mean it seems to be the opposite way around but that's what happened that's kind of weird FIFA for those of you who are football fanatics FIFA was in number of bribery scandals across the world mr. Blatter was asked to leave because he was apparently part and parcel of it but what was most interesting is about earlier this year FIFA hired an independent Ethics counselor they hire chief compliance officer they had a board many many board meetings and internal audit teams looking at bribery and corruption in the organization they had a new CEO and a couple of weeks ago if not months ago he sacked the entire ethics office and so an entire office that was designed and hired to clean up an organization has just been sacked so one could argue I mean are they ever going to clean up the act are they ever going to do something that's different then you have people like Wells Fargo's so Wells Fargo's an American bank and it turned out that they've been creating multiple in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of fake accounts so that the sales people could beef up their Commission's to get more money to take home and to our friends who bank with Wells Fargo in in America and when all this came out the first thing they did was run home to find out if theirs was a fake account if someone had stolen money from their account and moved it to one of these fake accounts but that's the other thing to think about when it affects you it's very different than if it affects someone out over there because it's your bank account it's your hard-earned cash that someone's stealing it's your hard-earned cash as someone's actually mirroring into a different account but that happened a lot and here's the other interesting thing the head of the retail bank who was in charge of this was paid a lot of money as a bonus and under public pressure she was asked to return it but she was paid it so we look at back to 2007 during the financial crisis where bankers I mean apologize to anybody who's in banking I was in banking sight I can see it I think they were paid millions and millions of bonus for for cat for causing the financial crisis and I'm being very facetious but there is a cause and effect here so that's kind of worrying and I look at something like uber we use it every day I love it I love over I love using the product but for those of you who are keeping up with what's going on in Silicon Valley and keeping up with technology uber has had a horrible year this year whether it's you know an engineer say there's been sort of repeated harassment and and abuse in in the company or they've had a driver being a used by the CEO and that's been recorded or they have all these actually these these technology sort of data points within their software to track where you are or they've got another sort of technology software inbuilt into the app that masks where how to get around the bid all their data points I mean that's kind of crazy and that's happened repeatedly only this year it's a sixty billion dollar company and they're quite a few people I know who would love to work for them I'm pretty sure in this room but again would you work for a company like this would you work for a Wells would you want to work for someone like FIFA if this is the type of organization in leadership they have and finally very close to home we've got Tesco Tesco was fined 100 whatever twenty nine million dollars for overstating accounts by three hundred twenty-six million pounds I'm sorry and you know you guys when you when you look at when you look at regulation you hear of this thing called sarbanes-oxley and you hear of Accounting Standards and you hear of non conflicts of interest and the independence of an auditor you haven't overstated by ten bucks three hundred and twenty six million pounds and that's not a decimal just flying around somewhere that's a lot of money so again this is all tone at the top and ethical considerations of an organization how do you think about it what does it mean how do you how do you integrate ethics and compliance into your organization's the other thing I learned when I was thinking about this talk is whenever you hear scandal in the headline that's not a good day that's a bad day that's that's not a good thing when you hear the words cover up that's not a good day but in my world in compliance it's my job to kind of help fix these and that's really tough I've had situations or friends of mine have had situations where they've been told you will need to bury something you'll need to bury a problem because we just don't want to think about it why because it's going to hit my bottom line but this is going to cause problems going to cause problems maybe for my staff for my suppliers for my customers for my team well you have to bury it because if I don't hit my numbers this quarter it doesn't matter about this ethics issue it doesn't matter at all I was doing I'm at I study a Executive MBA side Business School and we're in the process of finishing actually thank goodness but one of the things we realized is over the year and a half that we've been there we haven't had at all a session on ethics and so you'd hope you're not taught that you know you're not taught ethics in school you're not taught it at a business school or your universities and so you have to sort of discern what your ethics and what your values are from your friends your family your parents your siblings your culture and you integrate that into your organization because for sure an organization is not going to do it and so we had to do an exercise recently reiterated in terms of what's important in an organization whereas ethics fall and you'll see tons of surveys actually about this compliance governance ethics internal audit having codes of conduct is almost at the bottom and the first thing that gets cold in an organization when times are tough is guess what me so I don't think that's bad but I don't think that's great because it says that the tone at the top really doesn't care it's really not important we don't want to change the organization we don't want to change our culture so therefore as an individual how do you reconcile your personal values and your ethics with an organization that doesn't want to that's a really tough thing to think about you could be working for you know a Wells Fargo you could be working for uber and this is what they're doing if they're systemic for example systematic and harassment of female engineers which is not the case but if it was would you be able to stand by and let that be okay if you're the team that has to clean it up how would you clean that up that's a really tough thing to think about so one of the things I wanted to ask you is you know why does ethics matter a couple of years ago you might have heard for those of you who work in fashion or work in in textiles a couple of years ago there was a factory in Bangladesh that collapsed it was a high-rise building was about seven or eight floors and it was full of women and men and I think to some degree children or well young young people so includes and in the textile manufacturing industry sewing gone and for people like a Primark and Benetton and all these sort of high street companies and obviously you go to its Vietnam and Bangladesh and India and Mexico and all these other sort of emerging market economies which are supplying for because of as you know cheap labor so the building collapsed about 1,100 people died and when we look at the investigation of what happened it turned out that the building was built on a pond a pond the construction materials that were used were subpar the time taken to construction was a lot shorter than it should have been for a building such as that there were three extra floors to the building that should not have been there and all the structural engineering and the auditing done to check the safety of the building had been bypassed so you read between the lines and you can get what I'm saying which is people were bribed along the way to make this happen faster so that all these people could get into the building to design and so all these clothes for the high street so when I think about ethics and I think about cause and effect and responsible and and repercussions corruption and bribery and illegal activity and unethical behavior caused 1,100 people to die it's not just oh you know orange is not the new black it's not just that it's people can die because of it and when you are an organization that might have to employ people in Bangladesh to make your clothes and you do an audit of your labor practices and your team says well they're cheap labor you know India and Bangladesh have 1.2 billion people China has 2 billion people so what if 1,100 people collapse in a building and it's your job to clean it up it's your job to think about well how do you reconcile your moral values and your ethical values with a company or an organization that doesn't and how do you integrate that into solving the world's problems how does that have an impact so ethics matters I don't have an answer for you today as to what and how it looks for you because your ethical spectrum is very different to mine but when you join an organization when you go into the world and whether you start or end or you're in an employee and organization these are things that come up and so you have to by some default bring your own ethical standards to the organization that you work for and you might be surrounded by people who don't think like you and don't have the same moral compass that you have but you still have to hold your own I've had occasions when you know the Geneva occasion is such a wonderful one for me because I just thought if I'll never have to work again forever but it's at it come it is against every single value I hold as a human being everything and so I didn't want to do it and there's no way I was going to do it but those are things that I think about in my job every day and so you know people say oh compliance must be so lonely as a role or governance must be so lonely on being the person who says to someone or you can't do this must be such an awful job and I think for those of you who actually work in banking I'm almost certain that you hate your compliance teams because they tell you what you can't do but it's not in certain industries we tell you what we can't do because that's the law and then some other ones it's something that you have to do so I just thought I thought I'll give you an example and just quickly want me to think about something and you work for an organization you've done you've been an ethics your whole career you good at it you love it you love what you do you love the team's you work with and you work with people that are great and fine you're learning a lot and you like the company you like the mission that it has you like its values so far so good so far everything is going well and you think is great so I'm going to ask you for a show of hands how many of you would work for this company now quite a few quite a few that's really great it's the NHS not because you're not going to pay we paid a lot of money but this is what happened very recently at NHS a lot of data there was a data leak those thousands of people have been put to put at risk thousands of people the data as they put at risk the person who's responsible disappeared for 28 hours to 48 hours the minister was nowhere to be seen and now you have to clean up and that's a really tough gang so think about that think about how that works for you and then finally I want to just ponder this bribery is a perfectly acceptable business expense and in some occasions it is a friend of mine many many years ago was the crisis manager he used to be of head of crisis and and global threats for an oil and gas company and he said to me we used to train our employees on kidnapping because when they were in sort of very well nefarious locations there was a threat of kidnapping and so once they recorded a border and I'm often say which country in which border but they recorded a border and someone at the border said to them if you don't pay us a hundred thousand dollars we're going to kidnap this executive now in that instance you know what you're not going to call your compliance officer you're not going to wait wait a minute let me just speed dial the compliance lady or the compliance guy who sits in New York or London and see if I'm authorized to make this $100 thousand or whatever bribe that I have to pay you're going to do it but it is a bribe it is an illegal payment you do it and so therefore there's this huge sliding scale of ethics and morality and what's good and what's bad and when is it okay and when is it not okay but it affects you whether you know it or not every day in your life and so I'm leaving thought for you is when you think about an organization when you think about your companies where you stop them or whether you're part of them figure out how to integrate it into your company bring your own ethics and bring your own morals to the company because that's vitally important and most importantly if you figure out that tone at the top is non-existent be the change you want to see because you don't do it no one's going to do it and that's really really important to think about and you're not going to learn that in business school by the way so be those people thank you you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 232,148

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Business, Ethics

Id: yesE4mcv4CM

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017