Corporate Identity as a Communications Pattern

Marvin T. Brown, Ph.D., is one of the leading edge thinkers on corporate organization and ethics. His powerful ideas have included a significant method of resolving ethical issues in corporate governance, expressed in his book The Ethical Process, which has been translated into five languages. Professor Brown's latest book, Corporate Integrity, went through two printings in the first few months after it was published. In that book, he provides a number of original concepts and ideas which are effective tools for the management of successful corporations.

Samples from Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organization Ethics and Leadership:

A Corporations, of course, are not biological. They are, however, constituted by language, or, we could say, by ongoing communication patterns. These patterns include both verbal and non-verbal communications. The verbal communication includes mission and policy statements as well as daily conversations. The non-verbal includes work design, daily schedules and practical skills. If we looked at corporate systems as ongoing communications, then corporate integrity will depend on the character of these communications.@

A Of course, you cannot directly observe relationships, but you can observe the pattern of communication in which they are embedded, so the method for improving integrity of relationships is to analyze, evaluate, and redesign communication patterns.@

A The overall direction of global corporations today gives us some notion of what it must have been like traveling on the Titanic: To be slowly moving in the wrong direction, but too big and powerful to change course.@

A The ongoing conversational patterns that constitute corporations as human organizations are also multi-dimensional. For the stories to be told well, and for the telling to show what can and needs to be done, these different dimensions must become available for analysis, evaluation, and change.@

Marvin T. Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organization Ethics and Leadership (Cambridge University Press, printed in Cambridge and New York simultaneously, 2005).

Professor Brown teaches at the College of Professional Studies, University of San Francisco; and at the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. He can be reached through Corporate-Ethics US J.