This is a question that the FT asked in their weekly feature Judgement Call. I was pleased that Rohit Deshpandé said that there is a growing movement towards living by a guiding set of principles regardless of the local views on how businesses should be run.
Consultant and author, David Cushman, went further in the article saying; “Organisations have to remain true to their fundamental beliefs. There may be a short-term cost or loss from sticking to them but businesses built to succeed in today’s open economy must take a longer view because without consistency, trust disappears. Today’s winners are open businesses, those organisations that use their resources to create networks of people who care about the same things they do and who work with them to achieve shared goals.”
These align to our beliefs on how modern organisations should behave. Many companies and organisations are still struggling with their belief that they have to control all the communication about them, with the fact that in our modern, always on 24/7, this is increasingly impossible.