“We made a mistake.” That was the Volkswagen dealer’s answer when I asked him about the emissions testing exposé. Would you buy that?
Volkswagen is a good example of how quickly a reputation that has taken years to build can be damaged or destroyed. Yet Volkswagen may be better equipped to recover than most organisations. After all the company’s origins lie in Adolf Hitler’s pet “people’s car” project. On top of that, despite the scale of the problem, right now reaction to the revelation appears to vary from outrage to nonchalance, with the latter suggesting that the cause is not lost. It will be interesting to see just how damaging the revelations ultimately prove.
The dealer’s response suggests that remedial efforts are well under way and that a clear and consistent message is being told. Yet I would question the term “mistake.” For me a mistake is something that is either inadvertent or the result of a wrong choice. How much of what happened was a choice?
Yes, you could argue that the company ‘chose’ the particular course of action it did, but it was hardly a selection. Rather it was a deliberate tactic. There was no programming or design error that was simply ignored: instead the software was specifically programmed to identify when the engine was being tested, and to deceive the testers. That is a decision, not a choice. It is analogous to, but far more serious than, cheating in an exam: something that is never treated lightly. And this particular decision has potential consequences for vast numbers of people who might never come close to buying a Volkswagen.
My purpose today, however, is not to judge Volkswagen, but to offer potential solutions as to how we can ensure more ethical decisions generally.
Whether by fortunate timing or deliberate publication to coincide with the Volkswagen crisis, I was very interested to read the latest research by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) that “Employee Owned Companies Are More Ethical.” This is hardly surprising but provides further justification for my ‘Every Individual Matters’ model, which offers equity free ownership that could go a long way to preventing or mitigating the risk of ethical breakdowns like Volkswagen's.
Both the Volkswagen situation and the widely differing responses to it indicate that we need to do more to safeguard ourselves and our environment from ethically dubious decisions. We owe it both to ourselves and future generations to get back on the right moral track. Employee ownership or ‘People’s Companies’ clearly offer a means to do this. So why not explore the ‘Every Individual Matters’ model as the way to deliver these?
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, and the creator of the ‘Every Individual Matters’ organisational culture model that helps transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”