NetApp GC Asks, “Do You Work for an Ethical Company?”

Matthew K. Fawcett, senior VP, general counsel and corporate secretary for NetApp, knows a thing or two about developing and leading high-performance organizations. In this piece from Bloomberg Law, he addresses a not-so-comfortable question: Do you work for an ethical company? That doesn’t mean an organization, Fawcett cautions, that trumpets its commitment to doing business the “right way,” but an organization that has made the “careful, values driven, long-term leadership choices” needed to avoid situations such as those faced by Google, WeWork and Theranos. Fawcett lays out 7 tangible markers of companies with ethical cultures, including how hiring decisions are made and how compliance is woven into the company’s cultural fabric. “As a GC,” he writes, “I expect everyone on my team—and the entire company—to realize that the standard isn’t, ‘Is it legal?’ or ‘Can we get away with it?’ It should be: ‘Is this the right thing to do?’”