As stated in the preface, the designing of corporate integrity employs a civic perspective, focuses on relationships, and uses a method of examining and changing communication patterns. This chapter outlines the method. From the post office model of communication, examining and improving communication appears fairly simple. Just say things more clearly or get better feedback. From the contextual perspective, things get a bit more complicated. How can you change what is going on when you are part of it? It certainly is not possible without awareness, and awareness requires the possibility of reflection. Reflection occurs when we switch from automatic pilot, so to speak, to a conscious appreciation of what is going on. Such appreciation does not take us out of communication patterns, but it does change our attitude toward them. Once we have achieved this new awareness, we can examine and even change them.

In most situations, people do what they think is right considering the world they think they live in. Once we have figured out how things work in a particular setting, most of us get by fairly well. What is right is dictated by the situation. This sounds like moral relativism, which assumes that what is right depends on culture. The method presented here assumes that persons do act in the various communication patterns that constitute their culture. So, on the one hand, the method does not rely on some abstract, universal position from which one can judge the validity of different cultural norms.

The previous chapter presented a method for examining and changing communication patterns and examined the meaning of cultural integrity as openness to differences and disagreements. This chapter also performs two related functions. It demonstrates the significance of the book's focus on relationships and, at the same time, explores the interpersonal challenge of relational wholeness.

From a contextual model of communication, relationships among employees and between employees and employers are constituted through multiple verbal and nonverbal communication patterns. These patterns provide the context for addressing, or avoiding, a number of issues that affect the quality of the work community, such as health and pension benefits, job security, due process, occupational safety, fair wages, racism, gender differences, equal opportunity, balancing work and family obligations, privacy, monitoring, honesty, trust, conflicts of interest, and employee participation. Conversations about any of these issues rely on a number of ethical principles and standards of justice, which are sometimes included in corporate mission statements and codes of conduct. In other cases, those responding to these issues can bring ethical principles into the conversation. Whether any ethical analysis actually occurs, as well as what counts as ethically relevant, depends on the communication patterns that provide the expectations and limits of what should be discussed in specific situations. A conversation on due process, for example, would not even occur in a work setting dominated by the master-and-servant image of relationship. Its occurrence requires at least some notion of workers as having civic rights.

The scandals of Enron, World-Com, Arthur Andersen, and others in the past few years have once again destroyed the naiveté of those who trusted corporations and confirmed the suspicions of those who did not. This is not the first time that corporate behavior has confirmed the opinions of its critics and shattered the opinions of its supporters. The difference today is that corporate conduct, whether good or bad, makes a much greater footprint than ever before, not only on human communities, but also on the natural environment. Furthermore, as corporations have become more powerful, the civic institutions that have saved them in the past have become weaker. The overall direction of global corporations today gives us some notion of what it must have been like traveling on the Titanic: to be slowly moving in the wrong direction, but too big and powerful to change course.

There is another side of the story, of course. It is the story of the increased involvement of corporations in ethics, social responsibility, and corporate citizenship. It will be told in the chapters ahead. Both stories are important. Taken together they create the context for rethinking organizational ethics and leadership. In contrast to the narratives that make prime-time viewing and TV entertainment/news, these stories are not focused primarily on individuals. They are mostly about designing and redesigning the ongoing conversational patterns that constitute corporations as human organizations. These stories are also multidimensional.

The previous chapter concluded with the proposition that corporate integrity requires that corporations cooperate with other agencies in civil society in order to fulfill a city's mission. The chapter also showed how civil society serves as the context or container for such cooperative endeavors. This chapter addresses the final dimension of corporate integrity by exploring the container of both cities and corporations: the natural environment. How can corporations have integrity in their relationship with nature?

Understanding the relationship between corporations and nature may seem to rely completely on human imagination and knowledge. People may say that global warming is begging for attention, as though nature were speaking to us, but it is really the people who care about the future that are begging us to pay attention. There is a sense, however, in which we can hear nature by listening to our bodies. After all, we are creatures of nature. Our experiences of human vitality and fragility in different stages of life are nature's stories. So one way to understand an organization's view of nature is to review how it is designed to care for the health of its members.

Although any human community, by definition, is in part a natural community, some work communities have been designed so they are largely divorced from the rhythms of nature. The use of electric lighting, for example, creates a world of work separated from the earth's rhythm of light and darkness.

In the course of the previous five chapters, the quest for understanding corporate integrity began with the challenges of culture and ended with the challenges of nature, the two basic foundations of human communities. In a sense both nature and culture are always given; we are born into them and live in their context. Today, however, we no longer experience them as simply there. Their quality largely depends on current interpersonal, organizational, and civic relationships and these relationships depend on the design of the conversational patterns in which they exist. When these communication patterns do not promote corporate integrity, organizational leaders need to change them. This process of leading by changing communication patterns is the theme of this final chapter.

Organizational leaders who intend to promote corporate integrity will discover the possibilities and limitations for doing so embedded in the quality of the conversational patterns that constitute a corporation's cultural, interpersonal, organizational, civic, and natural dimensions. Because these five dimensions of corporate integrity are interconnected, the possibilities for developing corporate integrity are actually greater than one might first imagine. Reviewing some of these connections can set the stage for exploring how leaders can improve corporate integrity.

The connections among the five dimensions of integrity

When the last chapter concluded with the suggestion that corporations must become aware of their boundaries and limits, it was actually reiterating a suggestion already presented in Chapter 2.

What would corporations look like if they were to have integrity and how can we move them in that direction? In an effort to answer this question, Corporate Integrity takes a different path than most books that have distinguished themselves either in business ethics or corporate social responsibility. For one thing, this book overrides that distinction and provides a model of organizational ethics that is truly integrative. With a strong sense of integrity as wholeness, the book explores five dimensions of corporate life: the cultural, interpersonal, organizational, civic, and environmental. This exploration moves from an analysis of the integrity challenge on each of the five dimensions to a leadership strategy for meeting them.

The book is unusual in some other ways as well. It offers a particular perspective, a somewhat singular focus, and a special method. It explores the challenges of corporate integrity from a civic perspective. This perspective views corporations as members of civil society and corporate members as citizens. Instead of relying on the persuasiveness of the “business case,” which needs to show that doing well will result from doing good, the civic case relies on shared civic values of meeting human needs and respecting human rights. This allows an examination of how these values are realized not only in interpersonal relationships, but also in corporate relationships with other groups in civic society as they struggle to work together to design a sustainable world.

To bring these and other values into the analysis, the book focuses on relationships.

The previous chapter concluded that a corporation's purpose depends on its place in larger social systems. The purpose of automobile companies, for example, depends on the transportation system in which they exist. Corporations, of course, are not the only agents in these systems. Social systems also contain nonprofit corporations and government agencies. So how should these different agencies relate to each other? The idea that corporations should cooperate with communities and governments has become a standard requirement of corporate citizenship. This chapter examines what cooperation would entail in the context of cities or city regions.

Although many people would agree that corporations should cooperate with various public agencies, they would not agree about the best way to talk about it. As we have seen already in previous chapters, some people make the “business case,” which argues that doing good will result in doing well. Others make a case based more on reciprocity. Corporations should give something back to society for providing them with resources such as an industrious population, an educated workforce, or even the social infrastructure necessary for corporations to exist. A third argument, which was mentioned in Chapter 1, is that corporations should act as citizens. This idea has been more popular in Europe than elsewhere, but it seems to be spreading. Is this the best way to talk about corporate cooperation with public agencies? The previous strategy of using our understanding of nonprofits to shed some light on our understanding of for-profits can help answer this question.

The exploration of the two dimensions of corporate integrity reviewed so far have shown that corporate communication patterns should be designed for the inclusion of differences and disagreement and for relationships of secure civic reciprocity. These conclusions were drawn from answering the first two challenges of integrity, which required cultural openness and relational wholeness. Do these types of relationships really fit with the purpose of corporations? This chapter demonstrates that they do. The demonstration, of course, belongs to the book's overall approach of working from a civic perspective, focusing on relationships, and using a method of examining and changing communication patterns. The difference in this chapter is that organizations are also seen as agents. This means that integrity requires a consistency between their purpose and their actions. To understand the integrity challenge on this dimension of corporate life, it is necessary to understand what it means for corporations to pursue a worthwhile purpose.

“Why should corporations exist?” “What are they good for?” These questions will elicit different answers depending on the perspective from which they are addressed. An economic or financial perspective, for example, would give a quite different answer than a managerial perspective, or the civic perspective. Whether the question addresses the individual, organizational, or social level of analysis will also make a difference. This chapter primarily focuses on the organizational level, not because the other two are insignificant, but because that is where the challenge of organizational integrity exists: the question of a worth- while purpose.