Recividism is high in miscreant corporations. Moral deviance and psychopaty, it seems, need not be career limiting personality traits. This, together with centuries of in breeding and cloning has led to reduced institutional intelligence and a dearth of strategic capability making repeat offences inevitable. In the last month, BP, GlaxoSmithKline and Tesco have all been in the dock.
Putting profits before people has demonstrably failed as a strategy (see global financial meltdown & my previous blogs if you’re not convinced). Myself and others have been making the business case for ethics for longer than Justin Bieber’s been on solids (though rumour has it he’s regressed to a liquid diet). Take care of people and the planet. Put ethics at the heart of your business and the profits will take care of themselves. It’s not rocket science. Time and again we see that greed and the pursuit of short term profits lead to corporate catastrophe. Yet, it remains the primary corporate driver.
At the start of the month, BP was found quilty of gross negligence for the Deepwater Horizon explosion which killed 11 people and caused environmental carnage. The share price fell by 5%, wiping in excess of £5bn off its stock market value. Had BPs directors taken on board the learnings from a similar explosion only a few years earlier, the Deepwater disaster could have been avoided.
Yesterday, Tesco was forced to suspend four senior executives and call in investigators following the discovery that its profits had been artificially inflated by £250m. More than £2bn was wiped off its share value. A whistleblower warned that payments from suppliers were being irregularly booked and business costs were being misrepresented.
Last week, Chinese police accused GSK's former head of operations in the country of ordering employees to commit bribery on a widespread scale. Four senior managers from GSK’s China business were arrested last July while investigating £320m in potential bribes to individuals in order to secure higher market share & prices. Mark Reilly, who led GSK’s China business until the bribery scandal first broke last year, allegedly “pressed his sales teams to bribe hospitals, doctors and health institutions”, according to Chinese police.
The charges against GSK could lead to the cancellation of its business licenses in a major growth market. Reilly also faces jail.
There were suggestions that these allegations compromised GSK’s corporate integrity. I would argue that, if corporate integrity was a GSK priority, this scandal, like the one involving the reported use of black orphans as guinea pigs for drug trials or the Seroxat scandals before that, would not have happened.
A number of years ago I wrote to some UK charities that had awarded GSK gold star employer status for disability. I asked them how they squared the allocation of such a prestigious accolade with the recent BBC Panorama programme which exposed alleged evidence about GSK’s handling of concerns about their drug Seroxat (e.g. that it’s linked to aggression, suicide and dependency)?
I asked them to respond to the evidence which seemed to indicate that GSK had been aware of some of these dangers for a number of years but withheld crucial information from the public domain, only publishing trials that showed positive outcomes. It is also claimed that GSK knew Seroxat to be harmful to children, yet one month after the previous Panorama programme, where they denied this, they sought a licence for Seroxat to be prescribed to children. Although not licensed for this age group, it is alleged that GSK knew GP’s were prescribing it to them, based on the positive trial results published. What GP’s and the public did not know was that:
“GlaxoSmithKline's own clinical trial data revealed that the drug simply didn't work in depressed children. Worse still it made them up to three times more likely to self harm and attempt suicide than depressed children who were just given sugar pills. This was evidence the regulator had never seen before”. (Taken from Panorama transcript of 3 Oct.)
Panorama also produced, what it claimed to be, a confidential internal memo indicating that GSK knew that Seroxat, also known as Paroxetine, didn't work in depressed children as long ago as 1998.
SSB CONFIDENTIAL – FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY – October 1998
"It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy had not been demonstrated as this would undermine the profile of Paroxetine."
GSK’s apparent withholding of these clinical trials is the subject of an investigation and the programme indicated that criminal charges may be brought. My concern, then & now, is as much related to the ethical as it is with the potential criminal implications. In addition to many Seroxat users themselves, numerous eminent doctors were prepared to speak out on the Panorama programme, including the President of The Royal College of Psychiatrists.
I put all of this to the charity, which had no defence. Yet GSK retained its “gold member” champion of disability status on their website. I was told that member companies of the charity made financial contributions for that honour.
When will shareholders, government and business leaders (BP, GSK & Tesco’s boards are dominated by a white, male “like minded” elite) wake up to the fact that people, and how we treat them, is central, not peripheral, to profit making. Unless and until power is shared equally between women and men, and until marginalised voices are heard, the groupthink that lunges our world from one crisis to another, will prevail.
No comments:
Post a Comment