Salz Review - Wall Street Journal

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199 Salz Review An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices Not all high-risk industries have zero tolerance for safety risk. Wildfire fighters, for example, must balance allowing wildfires for environmental renewal, while protecting human life and property. To achieve this balance, wildfire fighters first reduce unnecessary risks, by actively pre-empting wildfires through controlled burn offs. Continual risk evaluation process improvement is supported by feedback from fire analysts, training based on an historical experience base, and on-call experts. Finally, the industry culture empowers staff on site to make decisions, given their situational awareness. Other high-risk industries must manage competing objectives and stakeholders’ expectations. In the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry, the dominant concern is patient safety. Pharmaceutical companies must ensure product safety, observe extensive legal and regulatory requirements and manage the significant costs of research and development, but they must also foster invention and innovation. Stakeholders (employees, trial participants, patients, physicians, carers, regulators and the public) all have interests in ensuring the risks and business practices of the pharmaceutical industry are closely managed. Pharmaceutical companies manage risk by partnering closely with regulators (to ensure safety and obtain approvals) and closely controlling standardised manufacturing processes. They also foster a culture of fact-based decision-making, informed by sequential trials, and clear risk/benefit evaluations. In some high-risk industries, striking a clear balance is hard. Defence contractors 307 have many, sometimes competing objectives. These include: national security; maintaining a national defence capacity; commercial profit and economic benefit. The industry also seeks to manage a balance between private and public interest – with the ability of a country to defend itself cost effectively partly depending upon the contractor achieving significant exports. Defence contractors must also weigh the ethical, reputational, bribery, corruption, legal, commercial, confidentiality, political, and “through-life” risks of each contract. To manage the combination of risk and competing objectives, defence contractors put in place robust policies and procedures which are reinforced by regular internal and external audits. This helps ensure strict compliance with controls and identification of issues. Companies need to consider not only physical or financial risks, but also reputational risks. In the automobile industry there have been periodic safety concerns. For example, the Ford Pinto was a popular subcompact car sold between 1971 and 1980. In 1977, a magazine article 308 claimed the Pinto’s structural design was dangerous for passengers. It cited a 1973 Ford internal cost-benefit analysis, which concluded that it would be cheaper to pay off lawsuits resulting from damage and injuries than to recall vehicles for repair. The article surmised that Ford had been aware of the Pinto security issues for a few years, but had decided not to act upon them. The memorandum quickly became known as the ‘Ford Pinto Memo’ and caused huge damage to Ford’s reputation. However, Ford’s senior management claimed that the memo’s figures applied to the US car manufacturing industry as a whole, and that the memo was primarily used to petition the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to enhance road safety, by reconsidering low expected penalties from car accident lawsuits. Following the “Ford Pinto Memo” controversy, the NHTSA ultimately directed Ford to recall the Pinto in 1978 for safety failures. Nowadays, 307 See the report by The Rt Hon The Lord Woolf of Barnes and the Woolf Committee, “Business ethics, global companies and the defence industry – Ethical business conduct in BAE Systems PLC – the way forward”, May 2008; http://ir.baesystems.com/investors/. 308 Mark Dowie, Pinto Madness, Mother Jones, September/October 1977 issue.
Salz Review An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices 200 the Ford Pinto Memo is still often referred to as an example of how exacerbated corporate focus on financial performance could take place at the expense of the customer and the company’s reputation. Reputational risks can also affect products across an industry, as much as individual companies within an industry. In the UK, numerous supermarkets have in early 2013 faced a scandal as a result of it being discovered that meat and meat products packaged as beef were in fact partly or significantly composed of horse meat, often provided by third party suppliers. Concerns were raised that, in their constant push to remain pricecompetitive and to drive down costs accordingly, supermarkets may have forced suppliers to compromise on quality and safety checks and processes, and that some type of contamination may have been a scandal waiting to happen. The National Beef Association accused retailers of “short-sighted, price-led purchasing tactics” and a “bullying culture”. 309 The scandal damaged consumers’ trust in the industry, causing some to switch to vegetarian meals or to purchasing meat from their local butchers instead of from supermarkets. This scandal highlights that even products and common business practices across an industry can cause significant reputational damage to individual businesses within it. The level of planning required to manage risks also differs by industry. In the nuclear industry, although some key risks are not readily identifiable on a daily basis, nuclear plant employees have an acute understanding of the potential consequences of a serious incident. In order to signpost and manage these invisible risks, the industry puts in place visible frameworks and decision rules. The nuclear industry perceives the risks it faces as being severe enough to warrant placing a strong emphasis on stress-testing its risk management processes at both the individual and the organisational level. The banking industry can and should learn from the business practices of other high-risk industries, for example: focusing leadership and operational discipline on areas of highest risk; creating mechanisms for sharing risk-related data cross-industry; fostering a culture of speaking up; working collaboratively with regulators and with other stakeholders; continually evaluating risks and the appropriateness of business practices; maintaining a balanced view of the different risks faced; being vigilant about industry wide practices which may cause reputational and other risks; and focusing on managing not only individual or business-level risks, but also organisation-level and systemic industry risks. Industries which have encountered trouble, or which actively look for potential trouble and collaborate in working to avoid it, offer some useful lessons for banks. 309 Ruddick, Graham, “Sainsbury’s chief Justin King warns of ‘new reality’ after horse meat crisis”, The Telegraph (online), 22 February 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/9886724/Horse-meat- Sainsburys-chief-Justin-King-warns-of-new-reality-after-horse-meat-crisis.html.
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