Ethics in evidence: ward winners exemplify message behind DU speaker series.

• Author: Houston, Tracy E.
• Position: Ethics

"I was 22, in my first few weeks of a public-accounting position right out of college, making just under $5,000 a year, when I found myself standing in a bank vault alone with millions of dollars at my reach during an audit," said Harvey A. Wagner, CEO of Quovadx, a Greenwood Village software company. "In my mind I knew that if I just took two of these crisp packets of hundred dollar bills I would have more than I make in one year. Even though the lights where dim and no one would see me, I never considered taking the money. I could not live with myself if I stole money. I would feel horrible."

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Wagner, who was hired by Quovadx to turn around a Colorado company that was and still is under scrutiny as part of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission's crackdown on corporate revenue inflation, is making progress at the turnaround task. But more interestingly, he has become somewhat of a regular public advocate of business ethics in Colorado over the past two years.

On a panel at last year's Center for Corporate Excellence annual conference on corporate governance, Wagner told the audience he doesn't give short-term guidance (forecasting earnings and revenue performances) to Wall Street analysts primarily because he's building a company for long-term growth, and because it might cause employees to do things they shouldn't under pressure.

Later that year, Wagner listened to David Greenberg, senior vice president and chief compliance officer for the Altria Group Inc., the $150 billion parent company of both Kraft Foods and Philip Morris, address a group of mostly business graduate students at the University of Denver. "Ethics comes from the top," Greenberg told the group. Promotion of ethical conduct and enforcement of ethics policies, he added, are senior management functions, not tasks to be assigned staff.

Greenberg's speech, last October, was the second in a set of DU lectures called "Voices of Experience, A Values-based Leadership Speaker Series," presented by the Department of Business Ethics and Legal Studies at DU's Daniels College of Business. The series hosts executives of national and multi-national companies and other speakers who are asked to discuss with students the kinds of issues Wagner faced both at the beginning and in the middle of his career, ethical choices that can determine the business history of not only a single company but, in the aggregate, the business history of our nation.

Greenberg, speaking of his own company's ethics program, and to an audience that was ready to pepper him with questions about the ethics of selling cigarettes, described ethics as values that kick in somewhat automatically for those who practice them. "Ethics step in where there are no rules," he said. "We don't want to police people. There are many gray areas where people that have a system of values can take it upon themselves to do the right thing."

Creating those values in students is the bottom line of the DU speaker series. It and the ethics-in-business program started at DU at the urging of the late Bill Daniels in 1990 have pushed the college to a No. 4 ranking last year among the world's business schools for producing graduates with high ethical standards.

MORAL INTELLIGENCE

Doug Lennick, an author and still an executive of American Express who has been called the "spiritual leader" of the company, will speak at the DU Voices of Experience series this October. He is co-author of "Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance and Leadership Success," recently released by Wharton School Publishing, a unit of the famous University of Pennsylvania business school, in which he and co-author Fred Kiel espouse proper moral and ethical decisions to enhance business performance. Lennick, who is also now a private consultant, started writing his book 10 years ago, long before more than $1 trillion of market capitalization in domestically traded stocks was lost to investors during the last corporate creditability crisis.

Lennick's research points out that establishing a direction, either positive or negative, within a company always affects the bottom line. He says the most successful modern business leaders of the future will be those who are ethical executives. "The next improvement level that will drive competitive advantage is morally intelligent leadership," says the author, who lives in Minnesota. "Companies that consistently outperform their competitors nearly always have morally intelligent leaders at the helm."

Superior performance--in work and in life--happens when we are "living in alignment," according to Lennick. Living in alignment simply means that our actions are consistent with our goals, and our goals are consistent with our moral compass.

But a quick look at daily headlines in the business press will tell you that living in alignment is easier said than done. Most people, including businesspeople, Lennick says, have a moral compass. They know right from wrong. But many of us don't consistently use our moral compass. That's where moral intelligence comes into play. Moral intelligence is the engine that transforms our moral compass into worthwhile goals and positive actions, he says. "With increased self-awareness we can create better self-management, which translates into better decision making under stress .... When our vision of...