Doing Better Business: From transparency to profitability

30th Nov 2011; 09:30

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RSA/CEB Panel

Recent months have seen a stream of corporate ethical failures on a spectacular scale. Corporate integrity, it seems, is in short supply, and public trust in business is on the wane.

But do we really know enough about what constitutes a good company culture? Can a company’s integrity be measured?

New research from Corporate Executive Board reveals that corporate culture is directly related to financial performance. Companies with more open and transparent cultures are proven to be more successful, more adaptive, and have systems that are self-correcting. Employees’ comfort in speaking up – raising concerns, talking about ethical issues, or sharing bad news – has the strongest correlation with long-term shareholder value creation when compared to any other factor.

And yet senior executives, particularly when advised by lawyers, are often secretive about sensitive issues.  Awkward or difficult matters, managerial mistakes, employee misconduct, and company failures are handled behind closed doors – even in the most ‘open-door’ environments.

Speakers: Wendy Harrison, Programme Director Ethics and Compliance, Shell International; Dan Currell, Executive Director, CEB; Matthew Gwyther, Editor, Management Today; Chandu Krishnan, Executive Director, Transparency International UK; Patrick Donovan, Chief Compliance and Ethics Officer, Airbus

Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA.

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