Just a day after a Goldman Sachs employee publicly called his company to the carpet for creating an (allegedly) unethical corporate culture, the business think tank Ethisphere on Thursday looked at the other side of the coin and added 145 corporations to its annual list of World’s Most Ethical Companies. The honorees come from dozens of industries, and 43 of the winners hail from outside the U.S. (see the complete list here). During the Global Ethics Summit in New York City, CorpCounsel.com caught up with several winners fresh off the red carpet.
Holland America Line and Seabourn
Kelly Clark leads the legal department that serves these two cruise-ship lines. She also wears two hats in her Seattle office: general counsel and chief ethics officer. While she acknowledges that there is a debate in the corporate world about how and whether the legal, compliance, and ethics functions should be grouped together, “I think for us, it works,” she says.
How does she balance these roles? As a GC, Clark says she thinks about “what must be done,” and as chief ethics officers she thinks about “what ought to be done.”
Clark has separate teams for each role. Two attorneys in the law department advise on legal matters. Meanwhile, she has an ethics and compliance specialist who focuses, in part, on communicating the company’s ethics message to employees.
“Part of what she helps me do is figure out how to inspire people to go a little bit further,” says Clark. “She’s out there to help the rest of the company understand why we value ethics in our culture.”
Clark says one of her big takeaways from the Ethisphere conference (co-sponsored by Thomson Reuters) was that the importance of setting a “tone at the top” is no longer a new concept. Rather, she says, the current challenge for companies is making sure that message travels company-wide so that, for example, employees are thinking about “how to help middle management own the ethics culture.”
