You Can’t Outsource Accountability

Now that Tiger Woods’s penis is costing millions of Americans their jobs, something has to be done about all this reckless celebrity behavior.  If it were just a sex scandal, we might have been able to laugh it off.  But as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has noted, Tiger Woods himself is an industry, and when he “takes a break” from golf, he takes the paychecks of everyone from baggage handlers to marketing executives with him.  No Tiger = no public interest in the PGA, and that = even more financial ruin than you can shake a 9-wood at.

So, should companies stop placing their seemingly-fragile brand image in the hands of entirely fallible humans whose occasional moral lapses are liable to rain Midas-like shame upon everything they touch in the eyes of our hyper-judgmental, media-saturated consumers?

Heavens no.  Instead, companies should conduct morality audits of their employees.  At least that’s what Mark Cenedella has suggested, and that he’s done so without any shred of visible irony means that somebody out there is probably taking it seriously.

In a nutshell, Cenedella says:

For the cost of a few hundred thousand per year — which would ultimately come out of the star’s pocket either directly or indirectly through lower endorsement fees — a security firm could act as a third-party morals auditor. An endorser’s business partner should know, long before the public, whether or not the star is engaging in behavior risky enough to potentially threaten the business.

Hmm… Insuring the future of your business against the moral transgressions of your employees?  Seems defensible.  (Perhaps Cenedella got the idea from Henry Ford, who used to send spies to evaluate his employees’ behavior in their homes.)

But what’s missing from this proposal?

How about an acknowledgment from the public that a company’s work or products are separate from the beliefs or actions of its people?

Or an awareness on the part of companies that hinging your own brand’s success on the star of someone outside the company is always a trust game?

Or the paradigm-shifting concept that everyone — from the company to the spokesperson to the public — is responsible and accountable for his or her own choices and actions as they happen, rather than rushing to blame or judging people pre-emptively or arbitrarily?

When a company hires a spokesperson, it’s rewarding that person for pretending to be a perfect embodiment of the company’s ideals.  Hence, the contract is already predicated on a lie.  So why, when the ugly truths are inevitably revealed, does that person who was already disproportionately compensated for his allegedly-positive image now pay an equally asymmetrical price for having committed mortal transgressions that wouldn’t have gotten the shipping guy fired?

This oversized reward-and-penalty system perpetuates the irrational, godlike mentality that causes someone like Tiger Woods to believe he has to apologize to the entire English-speaking world for something he should only be apologizing to his wife for.  But he wasn’t paid to only matter to his wife; he was paid to matter to all of us, and as such, he believes he does.

And here’s the real irony: Tiger Woods and his endless line of mistresses have presented us with what our President might call “a teaching moment,” in which we all have an opportunity to evaluate our own actions, our own images, and our own methods of taking responsibility for those actions.  And if the biggest lesson we take away from all of this is that companies need to better protect their financial assets from the blunderings of celebrity genitalia, then I’d say our teaching moment has passed.

Tags: accountability, America, Business, common sense, ethics, honesty, perception, pop culture, Sociology, sports