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chapter three Peeling Back the Onion C    men and women crowd the Palm Room at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Orlando, Florida, for the start of the  annual Ethics Officer Conference for the Lockheed Martin Corporation. Cleancut , casual, welcoming to a new face, ranging in age from their midthirties to their early sixties, they are at their ease. The Orlando Hyatt is a big step up from the venue of last year’s conference—a colorless facility within easy reach of corporate headquarters in Bethesda—so the mood is upbeat, even if the schedule does not promise much in the way of outings to theme parks. Dress is “business casual.” Most of the ethics officers are Caucasian, but there are a respectable number of non-White faces, mostly African Americans, as well. Some in the crowd are reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, and others are new to the Lockheed ethics world, so the conference begins with an icebreaker: Say something about yourself that no one else knows. After an undertone of ritual complaint about the exercise, they go with the program and settle around their tables to talk, and after fifteen minutes or so report out to the group. Gail at Table  once worked on venereal disease issues for the county health services. Rick at Table , who works at the Nevada nuclear test site, has  birds on his life list; friends know him as the “bird nerd.” Rose at Table  is revealed to have a “criminal past”: She hooked school in third grade. Someone at Table  admits that he used to cheat at Scrabble. Mock gasps follow each confession .At Table , one officer shows the Scrabble cheater that his actions were in violation of page  of the Lockheed Martin Code of Ethics and Business Conduct: “to be honest and forthright with one another.” As the icebreaker winds down, Nancy Higgins takes the podium. The chuckling tones down. In , Ms. Higgins is the vice-president for ethics and business conduct, Lockheed Martin’s top ethics officer, and the executive in charge of their whole operation.A woman in her forties, platinum blonde, she sports a broad, toothy smile that seems frozen on her face, even while she is speaking. She calls herself a “recovering lawyer,” having moved over from the general counsel’s office into the ethics operation at Boeing, before assuming Lockheed Martin’s top ethics job in . She speaks slowly, clearly, a bit pedantically, as she moves briskly through a “state of the ethics operation” talk, fortified by Power Point slides sporting Lockheed’s flying star logo. Higgins’s speech is a pep talk, reinforcing to her team the value of their work to the corporation. Ethics is a frustrating business, she readily concedes, since people tend really to notice us when things go wrong. But she is happy to cite chapter and verse of the division’s accomplishments . The ethics awareness program that really took off with Dilbert in  has gone through several reconceptions since then. Calls to ethics officers are up—a sign of confidence in the organization—and more calls than ever are being resolved on the local level, without any formal action being necessary. Lockheed Martin employees as a whole have given feedback that they think that the ethics program is worthwhile, and senior management continues to trumpet ethics as the corporation ’s “number one value.” There are challenges, to be sure. Surveys show that too many Lockheed Martin employees still believe that they live under a threat of retaliation if they come forward about ethics violations. It turns out that new employees—those who have been at the corporation for six months or less—are particularly vulnerable to ethics violations, since they have not yet fully embraced the company culture. Managers are sometimes turning a deaf ear to ethics concerns raised by those who report to them; sometimes, apparently, managers do not even recognize an ethics issue right under their noses.These challenges,however,are simply next year’s work, as the ethics division strives for continuous improvement. Most importantly, ethics is not simply an activity to fulfill a legal requirement ; it is a “value-added” component of the company’s mission. Part of Higgins’s rhetoric is defensive: Like other divisions that are not “profit centers,” the ethics and business conduct division constantly has to prove its worth in a bottom-line business. So Higgins cites the confidence that “the Customer...

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