Business ethics speaker David Childers advised Elon students to move beyond a sense of ethics as a set of hard and fast rules and toward a life of integrity governed by a sense of personal accountability. Childers, president and CEO of Portland, Oregon-based EthicsPoint, Inc., spoke on campus March 11 as the 2010 Business Ethics Speaker for the Love School of Business.
“I much more believe now in integrity, principles, values, and personal accountability, more so than I believe in ethics,” Childers said. He said rules and regulations cannot keep up with fast-changing world we live in.
“The pace of business today is incredibly fast,” Childers said, “and if you are rules based, you will never have enough rules. If you are waiting on me to tell you how to act with common ethical standards for what you do, you are going to be five miles down the road before you realize you need a standard, and you are going to wreck the car before I can get there.”
Childers said a military study of actions in the Iraq War developed a new way of thinking about the environment in which officers were operating.
At the War College, he said, they described that environment as one containing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, coining the term “VUCA.”
Childers suggested that the business leaders today operate in a similar environment.
To navigate in that kind of world, he said, successful leaders learn how to:
- Recognize risk
- Mitigate risk
- Know the stakeholders
- Promote integrity
- Foster trust
- Establish principles
- Review. Refine. Repeat.
Childers grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma; received a bachelor’s in history from Oral Roberts University; and holds a certificate in strategic business innovation from the MIT School of Business. He formerly was president and CEO of consumer electronics supplier Oregon Scientific.
His expertise is in the relatively new business field of governance, risk and compliance. He serves on several national groups developing standards and guidelines in that field.
Childers said his firm, a private company, has had some 2,300 clients around the world including such names as Yahoo, Siemens, Kraft, the New York Stock Exchange, and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
His firm helps companies gain awareness of the risks that could impact their businesses and provides software services to help reduce them. One service his company provides is operation of company hotlines that employees use to report bad or illegal business practices.
Childers’ visit was sponsored by the Love School of Business and Beta Gamma Sigma, an honor society that recognizes scholastic achievement in accounting and business administration.
