Code of Business Conduct

Posted by Alan See on May 24, 2009

3 comments | 1998 reads

A Fortune 500 corporate newsletter I was recently reading mentioned that their Code of Business Conduct was 70-pages long. The code outlined their requirements and guidelines for customer relationships as well as how the employees should interact with each other. Business ethics and customer experience strategies are not optional and should not be treated lightly; but are 70-pages really necessary to frame a Code of Conduct? After all, the Golden Rule is only 11-words long:

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Hmmm … also consider the following:

The Lord’s Prayer = 66 words

Gettysburg Address = 286 words

Declaration of Independence = 1,322 words

The more I think about it, 1-page should be long enough.

Alan See

Alan See is CMO and Vice President at MindLeaders. His background also includes time as an associate faculty member at the University of Phoenix where he facilitated courses in Marketing and Management Theory. He holds a bachelor of arts in business and an MBA from Abilene Christian University.

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Andrew Rudin

May 28, 2009

It Would Be Great if Things Were Simple . . .

Alan: your post reminds me of what I learned about the writings of Hippocrates and his students. The [i]Corpus[/i] contains 58 volumes, and much of the content surrounds ethics. On the one hand, that seems remarkable given the technology-induced ethical complexities we face in medicine today, compared to the time the [i]Corpus[/i] was written. On the other hand, it's not difficult to imagine how the myriad ethical issues the ancients confronted about life, death, and the treatment of disease required such extensive documentation and analysis.

Similarly, laws and regulations cover only a small portion of the rules of conduct people must consider for a commercial transaction. It doesn't surprise me at all that the document you referenced was 70 pages long. The other documents you mentioned--influential writings, all--don't serve the same mission, so it's hard to compare their merit on word count.

--AR

Graham Hill

May 30, 2009

Things ARE That Simple

Andy

It is a fact of life that complex, other-worldly stuff gets ignored in favour of simple, common sense stuff. If any company needs 70 pages to set out its policy towards customers, then it is a tacit admission that it has a serious problem that a fat manual is not going to resolve. You don't need a 70 pager to know how to deal with your customers. Neither do I. And neither does any other company.

Graham Hill
Customer-centric Innovator
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Alan See

May 31, 2009

Short, Simple and to the Point

I believe Graham is spot on.

From “Churchill on Leadership” by Steven F. Hayward:

He complained regularly that reports and memoranda were too verbose:

“This paper, he complained in cabinet one day, “by its very length defends itself against the risk of being read.”

He also stated that “It is sheer laziness not compressing thought into a reasonable space.”

In my opinion, a 70-page document does indeed “defend itself against the risk of being read.” If the purpose of the document is to help employees understand how they should be treating customers, suppliers, and each other then it needs to be much shorter. If the purpose of the document is for legal reasons, then 70-pages are probably only enough for the introduction.

Alan See

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