Corporate Integrity: A Toolkit for Managing Beyond Compliance

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

This lucid, frank, and much-needed guidebook defines various
perspectives on what it means for corporations to have integrity,
outlines the proper roles and responsibilities of corporations, and
provides detailed scenarios for planning and applying integrity models.
The authors’ central argument is that compliance with existing
regulations “is not enough to navigate integrity dilemmas,” and that
by anticipating and responding to the direction of regulatory as well as
public sentiment, corporations can reduce risk and actually increase
revenue. As Kennedy-Glans asserts in her introduction, “Here are the
business tools you need to take corporate integrity out of its box and
become a Moral Compass capable of directing your own organization to
integrity and greater upside potential.”

Especially convincing is the authors’ appeal for “proactive
management of integrity,” an approach emphasizing the importance of
emerging integrity problems. As the authors note, “Proactively
anticipating stakeholder expectations is often less expensive in the
long run when compared to short-term compliance with regulations.
Retrofitting manufacturing plants to comply with emergent environmental
and occupational health and safety standards is generally more expensive
than incorporating these standards in the initial plant design.” The
impact of recent high-profile corporate scandals can certainly be
detected in these recommendations, and the crucial significance of how a
corporation fares not just in legal courts, but also in the court of
public opinion, is rightly emphasized. In an age rife with scandals, a
reputation for malfeasance can doom a corporation in the marketplace
even if it does not violate formal regulations.

Like many business books, this one is rather enamoured with
catchphrases, and occasionally goes overboard with a befuddling
abundance of typographical effects (a giddy deployment of capital
letters, italics, and bold type sometimes distracts from the point at
hand). Overall, however, this is a clear and impressively comprehensive
guidebook on corporate integrity.