When Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick died last week, her meteoric career was widely celebrated. And rightly so. She opened her first cosmetics shop near Brighton, England, in 1976, when the concept of “ethical business” was in its infancy. Now, 31 years later, that idea is so embedded in corporate culture that no multinational can afford to ignore its social and moral footprint.

To be sure, some companies still seek an ethical posture through smoke, mirrors, and spin. But a great many others play it straight, demanding ethical business practices not only of themselves but of their franchisees, their advertising firms, and their suppliers in third-world countries. The Body Shop didn’t make that happen, but Dame Anita and her husband Gordon were among the first to ride the curve of ethical consumerism. They built their business on the premise that customers increasingly were concerned about the nexus of environmental protection, human rights, and corporate integrity that has come to be known as corporate social responsibility.

That Dame Anita was such a blazing personality was no detriment to her success. Vociferously importing the hippie, anti-establishment values of the 1960s into the driven and entrepreneurial 1990s, she insisted that the role of business was not to amass wealth but to improve the world. Traveling the world in search of natural cosmetics, she presaged the globalism of the twenty-first century, in which consumers know — and care — where in the world their products originate and who has been harmed or helped through their sourcing. To buy Body Shop products was to support the World According to Anita. It was to vote with your pocketbook, to purchase your way to a more just society, to feel that you too were making a difference. Never outgrowing her penchant for joining protests, circulating petitions, fighting animal testing, and supporting the marginalized, she created a very public record to show that by doing good you also could do well.

But meteors blaze because they fall. Beneath the brilliance of that public record — and brilliant it was — lie some persistent and well-researched accusations that some of her company’s success was built on hypocrisy. Jon Entine’s 1994 article in Business Ethics — “Shattered Image: Is the Body Shop Too Good to be True?” — as well as his later writings suggest that the company owed its early success not to her genius but to a deliberate plagiarism from a small but successful company in San Francisco that in the early 1970s had exactly the same name, color palette, product line, and marketing approach. Equally critical is a 1998 paper from London Greenpeace (not to be confused with Greenpeace International) detailing, among other things, the wholly synthetic ingredients of some Body Shop products advertised as “natural” — written by the same English environmental activists who fought McDonald’s to a standstill in the famous “McLibel Case” that was decided finally in the activists’ favor in 2005. In 2006 a lather of public disappointment frothed up when the Body Shop was sold for $1.3 billion to L’Oreal, the French cosmetics giant whose values on issues like animal testing appear to be at right angles with those professed by the Roddicks.

Which is the real story — the Body Shop’s own earnest protestations or the fulminations of its detractors? The truth probably lies somewhere in between. That fact raises the central ethical question: What are we to make of Anita Roddick’s example?

To assert that all she accomplished was built on sand, undone by a deep-seated hypocrisy that made the company look far better than it was, is to ignore the transformative influence she exerted in creating the current culture of ethical business. Yet to assert that she was (as some recent press coverage suggests) a kind of secular saint, blasting new channels of probity through the hard rock of multinational capitalism, is to ignore the compromises and opportunism that sometimes accompany a great entrepreneurial flair. If her company’s success came only because of its subtle deceptions, that fact needs to come out — even if only to help the world understand that running ethical businesses is harder than it seems. But if corporate social responsibility has been significantly enhanced by her proof that consumers want to support companies that they see as ethical, that fact must not be overlooked — even if only to credit her remarkable vision in identifying a newly discerning customer base.

The Body Shop, in other words, may be one of the most important case studies of our time. It reminds budding entrepreneurs of the need to keep ethics and creativity in balance. It traces the growth of corporate social responsibility and helps explain the role of charismatic leaders in creating new movements. It raises endless questions about being green versus appearing green. And it reminds us that as the world stumbles forward into greater ethical awareness, even flawed characters can make significant contributions.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“Many men and women of the church, bishops as well, have come to agree with my way of looking at the reality of the church’s role. We have much to be sorry for.”

– Argentine priest Rev. Rubén Capitanio, speaking last week to a panel of three judges weighing the fate of Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former police chaplain accused of complicity in the country’s “Dirty War.” Capitanio is among a growing group of people both inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church who say the church needs to answer for its role in abetting the crimes of the military junta that seized power from 1976 until 1983, suppressing dissent by killing and “disappearing” between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Father von Wernich is accused of “involvement in seven murders and 42 cases of kidnapping and torture,” reports the New York Times.

WASHINGTON
President Bush last week signed into law a measure that will require lawmakers to disclose more fully their involvement in funding pet projects as well as their efforts to raise money from lobbyists.

The Associated Press reports that members of Congress who are seeking specially targeted projects, known as earmarks, will be required to publicize their efforts before the measure reaches the legislative floor.

Other provisions of the new law require members of Congress and political committees to identify publicly lobbyists who raise more than $15,000 for them during a six-month period.

Also, reports the Hill, a publication covering Congress, the legislation will limit privately funded travel and ban lawmakers from accepting gifts and meals from lobbyists.

It also bars members of Congress convicted of felonies from receiving congressional pensions.

Although backers of the measure claim it represents sweeping ethics reform, critics say it still leaves gaping loopholes, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times.

President Bush signed the measure without fanfare and said he worried that it did not go far enough in cracking down on abusive earmarks, says the Times. Others object to provisions that make lobbyists for public universities and state and local governments exempt from the gift-giving provisions.

BOSTON
Another ethics scandal rocked professional sports last week after Bill Belichick, the head coach of the New England Patriots — the man regarded as the mastermind of pro football play calling — was fined $500,000 for videotaping an opposing team’s sideline signals.

The team also was fined $250,000 by the NFL, and will forfeit a draft choice.

The incident came to light after the Patriots’ opening-day rout of the New York Jets. USA Today reports that a video camera wielded by a Patriots employee was confiscated after a security officer noted that it was continually focused on Jets defensive coaches as they relayed their signals along the sidelines.

As reported by the Boston Globe, the disgrace of being accused of stealing signals, an action specifically prohibited by the league, is a particularly sharp blow to Patriots fans, who lionized their Super-Bowl winning team.

The incident, notes the Globe, follows recent accusations that a Patriots player used a banned performance-enhancing drug and an incident in which the beloved Belichick allegedly shoved a photographer.

In the immediate aftermath of the revelation surrounding the surreptitious taping, fans and sports columnists began wondering if the practice had been long-standing — and whether other teams were cheated by the Patriots in the past.

Newsweek sports columnist Mark Starr ponders: “Are stolen signals at the heart of Belichick’s legendary brilliant halftime adjustments?”

“We’ve seen the coaches on the sidelines shielding their faces and trying to cloak their signals — I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Seattle coach Mike Holmgren’s mouth — but regarded it largely as a byproduct of the obsessive behavior that is the coaching norm,” Starr writes. “Now it appears they may not have been sufficiently paranoid.”

Others wonder where the line is drawn between smart, aggressive play and outright cheating.

Chicago Tribune sports reporter Melissa Isaacson notes that there is even some disparity between how different sports regard signal stealing: “Baseball seems to have a more casual attitude toward espionage. The White Sox never seemed concerned with punishment in the years they employed crafty Joe Nossek as a signs-stealing bench coach. And the late Bill Veeck feigned both ignorance and insult when asked about stationing a spy in the center-field scoreboard at the old Comiskey Park to eavesdrop on the signs opposing catchers flashed to their pitchers and tip off Sox hitters.”

“But technology,” she writes, “in the form of the video camera confiscated from Patriots employee Matt Estrella, apparently crosses the ethical line.”

VARIOUS DATELINES
Recent developments in medicine, biology, and life sciences are triggering a variety of ethics dilemmas. Among last week’s top stories:

• The senior science adviser to the British government last week proposed a universal code of ethics for scientists. According to reports from the BBC and the U.K. Guardian, Sir David King characterizes the code as the equivalent of a Hippocratic Oath. It contains seven principles: “Act with skill and care; keep skills up to date; Prevent corrupt practice and declare conflicts of interest; respect and acknowledge the work of other scientists; ensure that research is justified and lawful; minimize impacts on people, animals, and the environment; discuss issues science raises for society; do not mislead; present evidence honestly.”
• Ethics programs have been ramped up throughout South Korea’s scientific community in the aftermath of last year’s stem-cell research-fraud scandal. The Korea Times reports that 96 public and private laboratories throughout the nation have set up verification programs for their research and development programs. Only 15 institutions had mechanisms to fight fraud or fabrication before the scandal broke.
• Genetics tests that can be administered at home are raising moral concerns, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. A growing number of start-up firms offer a service in which a small sample amount is collected and sent back to the lab. Chewed gum, a shirt containing perspiration, or a hair from a comb will suffice. Among the expanding suite of tests: a determination of an unborn baby’s gender and paternity. The paternity test raises some particularly troublesome questions because it allows mothers to conduct the test without the suspected father’s knowledge, reports the Chronicle.
• The Holocaust Museum is preparing an exhibit on the role of doctors in the Nazis’ attempt to engineer a “master race,” reports the Houston Chronicle. A new exhibit and lecture series, titled “Medical Ethics and the Holocaust,” recounts physicians’ participation in murder and gruesome experiments. The goal, according to the Houston physician who designed the exhibit, is to explore whether modern developments in genetics could lead to a new eugenics movement. “It’s a warning shot across the bow,” Dr. Sheldon Rubenfeld tells the Chronicle. “There’ll always be a push for individuals, nations, or races to dominate others — coming genetic capabilities will give them that potential more than ever before.”
• In Atlanta, researchers at Emory University are planning to launch a program to screen healthy patients for genetic clues indicating that they may be predisposed to future illnesses. But as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, the program also poses some ethical dilemmas, including what information could or should be kept from insurers and employers. “It’s not only about health and health insurance,” Eric Meslin, director of the Center for Bioethics at Indiana University, tells the Journal-Constitution. “It’s about life insurance. It’s about employment…. It’s pick anything where society is making judgments about who is fit to … get entitlements.”

LONDON
One of the top stories in the worlds of finance and ethics continued to reverberate worldwide last week, as aftershocks from the U.S. subprime-lending shakeout crossed the Atlantic.

The Bank of England provided emergency funding to mortgage lender Northern Rock PLC after the bank, pummeled by the subprime mortgage crisis, said it was having trouble finding short-term loans from other institutions to keep itself afloat, reports BusinessWeek.

According to a report from the London Daily Telegraph, police were called to keep order at some Northern Rock branch after lines of panicky customers, hoping to withdraw their funds, formed at many of the branch’s 72 locations. A spokesman for the bank told the Telegraph that customers should remain calm and that adequate funds are available to cover their accounts.

The subprime crisis continued to dominate financial headlines through the week, including a revelation by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who admitted that he underestimated the damage that could result from widespread defaults on adjustable-rate mortgages.

Timothy Otte, a columnist for the investment site Motley Fool, observed that Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, has promised to “act as needed” but not bail out investors or lenders.

Otte writes that the basis of Bernanke’s policy is based on the concept of moral hazard: “In short, moral hazard arises when a party believes it will not have to face the full consequences of its actions, giving it an incentive to act in ways that may be inappropriate.

“Moral hazard can rear its ugly head all over the place,” Otte writes. “Recent history is full of examples, from Third World countries borrowing money and then defaulting on the debt, to the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. In the subprime world we are seeing moral hazard effects relating to both borrowers and lenders. Borrowers take on more credit than they can handle, believing it’s not their money at risk, and bankruptcy is a reasonable out. Lenders offer credit to high-risk customers, with the intent of packaging the loans and selling the paper to other lenders who will bear the risk of default.”

In related news, a research paper by Katherine Porter, a law professor at the University of Iowa, claims that the bankruptcies expected in the subprime shakeout might not be such bad news for the credit industry after all. In her paper, featured in a recent Salon analysis, Porter writes that “creditors repeatedly solicit debtors to borrow after bankruptcy. Families receive dozens of offers for new credit in each month immediately after their bankruptcy discharge. Some offers specifically target these families based on their recent financial problems, using bankruptcy as an advertising lure. Other credit offers emanate from the very same lenders that the families could not repay before bankruptcy. While not every lender will accept a ‘profligate’ bankrupt as a customer, debtors report being overwhelmed after bankruptcy with a variety of credit solicitations from many sources. Lenders offer families most types of secured and unsecured loans.”

LONDON
Last week’s sudden and unexpected death of Anita Roddick, a pioneer of socially responsible business, prompted a variety of analyses and observations from the world press.

Roddick, who founded the Body Shop with the philosophy of marketing eco-friendly products, inspired a wave of admirers, including entrepreneurs who wanted to emulate her business model.

“There are no words to describe how inspiring she was,” Verne Harnish, founder of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization and CEO of Gazelles, a Virginia business-consulting firm, tells Fortune. “She transformed her industry by being everything at once: philanthropist, entrepreneur, and an amazing woman.”

The London-based Economist offers this view: “The only kind of entrepreneur who becomes famous in Britain, a nation sniffy about business people, is the flashy personality who embodies the brand. Think of the bearded Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic, grinning at his incessant photo-calls, or the foul-mouthed Michael O’Leary of Ryanair cocking a snook at stodgy old British Airways. Or Dame Anita Roddick, a true child of the 1960s, whose Body Shop cosmetics chain blended sensuousness, environmentalism, feminism and glamour with a whiff of political correctness.”

But the International Herald Tribune and the Australian Age note that Roddick was not without her critics. Some cried foul when Roddick sold her company in 2006 to the French cosmetics giant L’Oreal for $1.14 billion, noting that L’Oreal had yet to ban animal testing, one of the fundamental principles of the Body Shop.

Roddick died at age 64 of a brain hemorrhage at a hospital in Chichester, England.

NEW YORK
The world of technology spawns ethics dilemmas as quickly as new computer applications. From the top news of last week:

• ComputerWorld writer Tam Harbert examines a growing issue in the world of information technology: the ethics role of IT specialists. In a major article in last week’s edition, Harbert speculates on the IT professional’s obligation in incidents such as discovering pornography on an executive’s computer, monitoring computer behavior of employees who break company rules, and using or abusing the power that comes with being at the nerve center of corporate communications. He notes that many dilemmas fall into legal gray areas, but “ideally, that’s where corporate policy takes over, governing ethics in the workplace and clearing up gray areas. A good policy removes personal judgment from the equation as much as possible.” Harbert quotes a warning from John Reece, the former CIO for the Internal Revenue Service and for Time Warner: “If you haven’t published a corporate law of ethics, if you don’t set out your policy and your guidelines, if you don’t make sure that people know what they are and understand them, you’re in no position to hold [individual workers] accountable.”
• A group of futurists met last week to discuss the question of what happens when machines become smarter than we are, reports the Canadian Press. The “Singularity Summit” brought together hundreds of Silicon Valley experts to ruminate over the ethics guidelines necessary to ensure that self-programming computers and human brains supercharged with microprocessors do good instead of evil. One attendee told the CP that his greatest fear is that a brilliant inventor will create a “self-improving but amoral artificial intelligence that turns hostile.”
• Breaking up may always have been hard to do, but it’s getting progressively more sinister in the information age, reports the New York Times. Reporter Brad Stone notes that divorce litigation has taken “a decidedly Orwellian turn, with digital evidence like e-mail messages, traces of Web site visits and mobile telephone records now permeating many contentious divorce cases. Spurned lovers steal each other’s BlackBerrys. Suspicious spouses hack into each other’s e-mail accounts. They load surveillance software onto the family PC, sometimes discovering shocking infidelities.” Stone points out that many programs used to collect evidence of infidelity and other indiscretions are cheap and readily available.

From CareerBuilder.com and Harris Interactive:

“Ever wonder why you can’t seem to get anything done in the office? It may be because your co-workers are preoccupied with something other than work. ‘Workplace Taboos’ is a new CareerBuilder.com survey, conducted by Harris Interactive of more than 5,700 workers. The most common workplace taboos that workers admitted to taking part in include:

• “Falling asleep at work (45 percent)
• “Kissing a co-worker (39 percent)
• “Stealing from the office (22 percent)
• “Spreading a rumor about a co-worker (22 percent)
• “Consuming alcoholic beverages while on the job (21 percent)
• “Snooping after hours (18 percent)
• “Lying about an academic background (4 percent)
• “Taking credit for someone else’s work (2 percent)

“Men report that they engage in all of these workplace taboos more than women….

” ‘As companies continue to embrace more casual environments, employees may develop a false sense of informality when it comes to the office behavior,’ said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder.com. ‘Employees should make sure they are aware of company policies, so something that initially seems ‘harmless’ doesn’t end up negatively impacting a career.’…”

“I have always advocated the love for mankind not out of sentimentality or idealism but for sober, economic reasons: because in the face of our instinctual drives and the world as it is, I was compelled to consider this love as indispensable for the preservation of the human species as, say, technology.”

– Sigmund Freud (Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, 1856-1939)