Integrity – is it still important?
There have been a few stories over the last week or so about the scam advertisements on social sites mainly Facebook, arguably the most successful social site. It appears to have started with this commentary – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/ on Techcrunch. One of the Facebook successful applications company’s CEO can be seen discussing his early strategy in an online video where he basically said he did whatever was necessary to have a successful business – see http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/8R96Mx4zId8/. Many of these companies are being held up as successful start-ups with multi-million valuations based on the number of users they appear to be attracting.
This got me thinking about why it appears that it is OK do just about anything to be successful. It appears that we are more accepting of behaviour that is justified by the ‘success’ culture. We seem to accept past and present transgressions for the rich and famous and still hold them up as role models when maybe we should maybe vilify them.
Business particularly, especially big, ‘successful’ business seems to be getting quite ruthless in their dealings with suppliers, employees and customers. Do you really believe that out-sourcing their support to India is about giving you, their customer, a better service? These days you can phone any one of the FTSE companies and you are likely to be guided via an array of pre-recorded messages with the option to speak to a human being hidden somewhere deep in the menu system. This phenomena has been brought about by the ‘money’ people, the finance houses that now appear to own just about any sizeable corporation in the UK. Their success is measured by the value of their shares and not by their business integrity.
We, the customer, need to realize that we are the power that makes these corporations powerful and successful and we can demand they do business with integrity if they want our adulation and our money.
Another example of lack of integrity – http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/0bu178EPS4E/ and it get better here http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/_ej9dWF-Ugc/