Let’s begin with a brief story about a recent CEO transition we worked on that speaks volumes about the communications environment in the United States in the wake of the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley act.
The board of this particular company decided that the CEO of an underperforming manufacturing company wasn’t going to turn things around anytime soon, so they decided to get ahead of the curve and force him to resign. They felt they had very good reasons for acting, despite the fact that the CEO was a knowledgeable, decent person about which everyone had good feelings.
Even so, we did something that in the past would have been a very curious thing in the second paragraph of the news release. In that graph, the company felt prompted to actually make note of the fact that the CEO was a person of high integrity and ethics, and that there was nothing in the action to remove him from office that had anything to do with any kind of wrongdoing, either individual or corporate in nature.
The moral of this story is that five years ago, there would have been no mention of the CEO’s integrity or a disclaimer about potential unethical conduct. In fact, if we would have advised that such a disclaimer be put in the second paragraph of a press release we probably would have been laughed out of the board room. The perception would have been that “we protest too much” in other words, if you have to underscore your own integrity, then that might in itself prove that you do, indeed, you have an integrity issue.
See full Article.
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