Meeting the challenges of globalization. (Caux conferences 2002).

Jacqueline Lammeree resigned her legal affairs post at WorldCom, six months before the accounting black hole in the American telecoms giant was made public. WorldCom filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July.

Lammeree, now a legal affairs director at Priority Telecom in the Netherlands, says there was an esprit de corps among the workforce at WorldCom, and she admits she found it difficult to leave. But she had suspected dishonesties. `I felt that things were not right; in top management. There were contradictory policy decisions from the US and there was very poor communication. The European management didn't clarify things. There was so much difference between the workforce and the leadership.'

`Rules are very important,' she told the 29th annual Caux Conference for Business and Industry, 20-24 July. Organized by Caux Initiatives for Business, it attracted 300 people from 26 countries. A first-time participant, Lammeree says she was struck both by the expertise of the speakers and the spirit of the conference, including the emphasis on personal integrity and responsibility in business.

Don Cowles, a senior executive from Alcoa aluminium corporation, also welcomed the emphasis on accountability. The US multinational had gone through a `fundamental change over the past 10 years,' he said. `In the early 1990s we moved to a values-driven model.' This, he said, reflected the Principles for Business published by the Caux Round Table group of senior executives. He saw in the company's new values `a reflection of my own faith. It gave me a whole new energy.' Every employee had a stake in safety and Alcoa now claimed to have America's best safety record. A lesson learnt in a Brazilian plant, for instance, would be communicated worldwide to Alcoa's 350 facilities within 24 hours.

Participants from the industrialized and developing countries emphasized the `asymmetrical development' of globalization, in the words of Kimon Valaskasis, founding president of the Club of Athens, and a former Canadian ambassador to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. There were no global anti-trust laws, nor any global accounting standards, he said. Globalization was `like an Olympic competition, but without any rules or referees'. Half of all global trade was between subsidiaries of multinationals. The WorldCom and Enron accounting scandals `would have been scarcely possible before globalization', he claimed. Organized crime and terrorists benefited from a world without borders and rules, and governments had been slow to catch up. The new Club of Athens aimed to look at issues of global governance, bringing together `thinkers and actors'.

Dr Frances Pinter, a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, said that non-governmental organizations were often supported from the `ill-gotten gains' of corporations `who then end up being attacked on the streets of Seattle. So we live in a very intertwined world.' She emphasized that civil society gave a voice to citizens, but too many people were still left out of global civil society altogether through lack of representation.

Indian industrialist Sarosh Ghandy said it was possible to be competitive in a global market `and still follow the path of social consciousness and maintain values'. `Competitiveness is not merely a function of how closely one watches the bottom line or cuts costs,' said Ghandy, Managing Director of Telcon, a Tata Industries joint venture with Hitachi, which manufactures construction equipment in Bangalore.

Ghandy estimated that Tata Steel (Tisco) and Tata Engineering (Telco), `spend around $20 million a year on providing facilities for their employees'. These ranged from housing, education, health-care including private company hospitals, family planning and welfare, to subsidized power supply, rural village development projects, and community forestry. Despite these costs, `Tata Steel produces the cheapest steel in the world, and exports its products all over Asia, Europe and America,' he said. Tata Engineering maintains 68 per cent of India's market share in commercial vehicles, including trucks and buses, and exports them to 45 countries.

Globalization, however, had forced both Tisco and Telco to downsize drastically. `Realizing the miseries that would be created among thousands of people, each company devised liberal severance schemes to protect the salaries of displaced employees up to their retirement. The human asset is the greatest asset and should be treated as such.'

Emphasizing the role of consumer choice in globalization, Andrea Cooper, a British manager with the consumer products multinational Procter and Gamble, said her company would never knowingly condone illegal or unethical dealings anywhere in the world. She pointed out that one in six shoppers would buy or boycott products because of a brand's or manufacturer's reputation.

The emphasis on personal choice impressed Hein Bogaard, an economist from the Dutch Foreign Ministry's Department for Sustainable Economic Development. `People are ready to ask what they can do themselves. I've been to many conferences where people say the World Trade Organization or our governments should do this or that. But what we can do as a company, or as a person within a company, beyond the law--that gives a very different spirit to this conference compared with others. I come away with an energy to do things, to write, to continue discussions with people I've met here.'

One of the CCBI organizers, Dutch financial analyst Menso Fermin, said the conference had advanced his thinking `on the role I can play as a socially responsible consumer and investor--but also in improving integrity, responsibility and accountability in my consultation work'. Co-organizer Steven Greisdorf, a financial consultant from Washington DC, added: `Globalization is a fact, like air and water are facts. But I am unwilling to accept that my choices have no impact on this trend. It is only by choice that the asymmetries of globalization can give way to hope and opportunity, missing from so many lives around the world.'

But perhaps the `asymmetries of globalization' were most starkly illustrated by Emmanuel Ndejoule from the Central African Republic, now living in Paris. How, he asked, could he explain to his family, living in a remote village back home, that he worked with information technology on artificial intelligence? The Internet and e-mail were completely foreign to them. They had no electricity and globalization was passing them by completely.