With the collapse of high-profile companies such as Enron and Tyco,
worldwide anti-globalization protests, and recent revelations of
questionable behavior by financial groups and auditors, corporate
behavior has become the highest priority topic for businesspeople,
investors, politicians and the public. Yet despite the critical
importance of maintaining public and shareholder trust, most
corporations make very little formal effort to actively manage the
activities that can put their reputation, share price, and customer
base at risk. Most corporations officially embrace the concept of
Corporate Social Responsibility; but giving money away to local
communities or worthy causes will not prevent an ethical disaster.
The problem is not social irresponsibility; the problem is a lack
of knowledge about what is taking place in the company or at its
subcontractor sites. What companies need to be thinking about is
not a theoretical construct around Corporate Social Responsibility,
or how they can spin public opinion by charitable actions. They
need to be thinking about how they can create a practical knowledge
and risk management framework in their company that allows them to
avoid costly and reputation-damaging behavior in the first place.
Ultimately, this comes down to knowledge management. Whether
violations of human rights, employment law, or environmental
standards - or simply accounting shenanigans - invariably the
reason that these activities are not anticipated and avoided is
simply that executives and board members do not realize what is
happening in the organization, and what the likely implications of
actions will be. And the larger the organization, the more
extensive thatlack of knowledge.
The good news is that developing a strategic approach to corporate
integrity is neither exceptionally expensive nor particularly
difficult. The problem is that companies that are already using
sophisticated information technology and knowledge management tools
for gathering internal and external information have focused those
systems and practices almost exclusively on operational issues and
increasing productivity. But these same knowledge management
techniques - built around emerging ethical guidelines being
developed by international standards groups - can be used by
companies to create an effective global policy for building and
maintaining corporate integrity. This means applying knowledge
management techniques in three important areas:
* First, they need to mobilize key employee knowledge and the vast
amount of information available on potentially sensitive issues in
a way that allows key decision-makers to "sense and respond"
quickly and correctly to developing risks.
* Second, it means creating objective, scenario-based guidelines
for ethical behavior, communicating those guidelines using
knowledge management techniques among key organizational leaders,
and providing a workable system of incentives for managers to
surface potentially dangerous issues.
* Third, companies need to adopt emerging guidelines such as AA1000
that provide for ethical procedures and performance indicators that
enable companies to audit and monitor their own behavior, and also
to provide shareholders and the buying public with an objective
report on the company's ethical performance. Much like ISO 9000,
Six Sigma and other performance and productivity and
practicestandards of the 1990s, these new global ethics standards
will inevitably become a baseline by which investors and customers
judge a company's potential for future growth and stability. High
marks on auditable ethical performance set against these guidelines
will become an important way for companies to differentiate
themselves from their competition in the future.
Developing a workable program for corporate ethics will be one of
the most important issues of this decade, and will be "the next big
thing" for large organizations. A drive toward standardized
reporting of corporate ethics practices was coming anyway; the
recent public corporate disasters will only encourage corporate
executive teams to scramble to demonstrate to customers and
shareholders that their organization takes these issues seriously.
This book, therefore, will be a primer for business people and
business students worldwide who will shortly be tasked with
devising or participating in those types of corporate integrity
initiatives, and will explain how knowledge management is
indispensable as a tool for helping corporations to manage their
risk and integrity policies. Through a mixture of leading practice
case studies and a clear framework, it will show how a corporation
can begin to combine leading practices in risk and knowledge
management with emerging international guidelines in order to
develop and manage a program of corporate integrity.
* The first book to show how knowledge management and corporate
integrity intersect
* Shows executives how to develop a strategic approach to corporate
integrity in this post-Enron age
* Neef, an expert on knowledge management, explains how a company
canre-engineer existing knowledge management systems to build and
maintain an effective corporate integrity program
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
