Critics reviewing James Champy's new book, X-Engineering the Corporation, have made droll comparisons to Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Champy's touchy-feely rules for corporations making better use of collaboration seem to some reviewers a self-evident return to Business Ethics 101. The point many miss, however, is that the bulk of New Economy proponents washed out of Romper Room Rules of Order.
In a dinner conversation with Intersil executives a few weeks ago, we talked about the necessity of returning to basics if the industry is ever going to climb out of this recession. For example, Champy's useful rules of collaboration should be combined with an understanding that startups must have the wherewithal to go it alone when necessary. The very phrase "and then we get acquired by X" should be banned from all PowerPoint and business-plan lexicons, because there's no one out there to acquire a fresh idea.
Even with a great concept, startups must ascertain that there really is a community receptive to buying the products or services developed. One example is very obvious at this week's Optical Fibers in Communications conference: The short-term photonics opportunity is clearly in interconnect and very short-reach optics, yet venture capitalists somehow were persuaded to fund several startups in OC-768 core transport. Hello! Fiber interexchange carriers are dropping like flies, and it's unclear where anyone is going to make a 40-Gbit sale in the next couple of years.
Obviously, if you're a carrier, turning your company into a derivatives broker for fiber swaps places you firmly in the Jeff Skilling camp, somewhere no one of sound mind wants to be.
For companies approaching or in the middle of an IPO, the message of transparency and honesty carries more than an ethical veneer. If you violate SEC rules of insider trading, you will go to jail-even in the looser Bush climate.
And of course, there's the game of pretending to exist when a bankruptcy is all but guaranteed due to markets' dissolving. Some companies try for shell games through reorganizations, often leaving workers stranded in the process, while others try to parcel out assets without explicitly dissolving the corporation.
Enronitis notwithstanding, there still are some basic ethical flaws visible in many of the industry's leaders. Like Champy and Fulghum, let's go back to the rules of Sunday school and kindergarten nap time. The New Economy hoodlums ignored that history at their own peril.
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