Rebuilding Trust
Last month, Ken Lay died of a heart attack.
The former president of the US energy giant Enron - a self-made millionaire, a friend of George W Bush and a committed Christian - had been convicted only the month before of most of the crimes he was charged with relating to Enron's collapse. His death brings to a close one plot-line in America's most celebrated tale of corporate greed, mismanagement and corruption.
But the bigger story continues. Former employees need to rebuild their savings, investors to recoup their funds. Managers have to go on running companies, accountants to go on auditing them. Thanks to Enron - and Worldcom, Parmalat and Vivendi, among other companies mired in scandal in recent years - the public trusts businesses and business leaders less today than ever.
This matters. Mistrust is not simply a theoretical issue, an interesting but ultimately irrelevant problem for ethics. It costs money, destroys opportunities and fractures relationships.
Creating trust in business can be a complex, technical affair. The measures currently in place - relating to accountability, transparency and financial, social and environmental auditing - often seem incomprehensible to the public whose trust they are intended, ultimately, to secure. And they seem a world away from the gospel.
Yet at the heart of this matter lie some profoundly human (if no less complex) questions. How do we understand human nature? Are we essentially good or inherently flawed? Should we think of ourselves as individuals or as relational beings? Should we assume that people are motivated by altruism or self-interest? Should we build relationships through contract or covenant? Do we secure them by tolerating or punishing mistakes?
In answering these questions, we may not readily use the language of sin and forgiveness, justification and righteousness, but these are precisely the sort of issues those concepts address. After all, Paul was not averse to using the language of the marketplace to describe the cross (1 Corinthians 6.20).
There are many different, if subtle, ways in which Christian thinking can help us to rebuild trust, in business and elsewhere. Ideas of sinfulness and faithfulness, covenant and forgiveness all contribute something.
But, at heart, Christian reflection makes one key observation: trust is not just beneficial to life, it's integral to it. To be fully human is to trust and to be trustworthy. Ultimately, our commitment to trust is no less than a commitment to our own humanity.
Nick Spencer
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