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Ethics expert keys on rules [The Record (Hackensack, N.J.)](Record (Hackensack, NJ) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Sept. 16--Lee Augsburger, senior vice president and chief ethics and compliance officer at Prudential Financial Inc. in Newark, was ranked on the 2013 list of 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics by Ethisphere Institute, a consulting firm dedicated to defining the standards of ethical business practices. As an adjunct professor at New York Law School and a 20-year veteran at the financial services company, Augsburger is well-versed in business ethics. The Ridgewood resident sat down with The Record to talk about what it's like to be, as he calls it, the "conscience" of this Fortune 100 company. (This interview has been edited and condensed.) Q. What's your rule of thumb for ethics? If you don't want it seen in the light, don't do it in the dark. It's a little bit like saying, 'Do you want this to show up on the cover of The Record?' And if you're good with that, you're probably fine. Q. How much does protection of privacy play into ethics, especially in light of big companies experiencing recent cyberattacks and data breaches? The question I'd have for you is, 'Are you going to go to Home Depot next week and use your credit card?' Think about the impact that's having on Home Depot's business. Target has had the same problem. We do business in a very complicated world, and when people entrust us with personal information, it's our obligation, it's a fiduciary duty _ right at the heart of the trust relationship _ for companies to take that seriously and maintain that confidentiality. Q. What are some of the smallest and some of the biggest ethics cases you've encountered? Some of the smallest issues are those that involve individuals who do things really hard to understand _ like the individual that stole food out of the cafeteria. I was here at Prudential when we were working through the sales practices problems in the mid-'90s. That left an indelible mark on this company because we had a systemic problem. We had insurance agencies that were misrepresenting policies in order to almost churn _ taking value out of existing policies and buy new policies and the insurance agency then got the premiums. That was a really hard, hard experience for the company _ in part because we looked and then said, 'How can we have this kind of problem that's so far-reaching across the organization?' We put in a whole host of new policies and new processes to keep that problem from ever happening again. That was the initiation of our ethics organization that truly buttressed our compliance organization, and I'd like to think that really was the turning point for the company. Q. What do you think drives people to do unethical things? How do you prevent that? People fundamentally know what the right thing is to do, but there have been more studies in the last few years than I can count that suggest that if we're left to our own devices, we will cheat a little bit. ... One of the things we do is we publish our disciplinary activity that's occurred in the previous 12 months. We don't name names, but we describe circumstances. We describe fact patterns of things that have actually happened, and we describe what the consequences were to the individual under those circumstances. We tell those stories. They're real and they, unfortunately, happen, and it's important that everybody understand that this is what the company standards are. Q. How do you teach business ethics? In the corporate role and in a business environment, the question you have to ask is not, 'How are we going to learn ethics at a personal level?' The question is, 'What are our values and what are the ethics of this organization?' and then the important question is a follow-on, 'How are we going to enforce that and how are we committed to that in our organization?' Q. What makes what you do important? If I were the mayor of a town that had 50,000 citizens, I would never tell the city council that we can get rid of the jail. In some ways, I'm sort of the corporate sheriff for a company with 50,000 employees. I'm working to help keep the company as a whole on the right track through watching and helping our employees do the right thing. –––– Email: [email protected] ___ (c)2014 The Record (Hackensack, N.J.) Visit The Record (Hackensack, N.J.) at www.NorthJersey.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |