I absolutely agree. But this only works if the top leadership are themselves ethical people. If they are unethical or even neutral, it’s going to backfire. Instead of hiring people for their backbone in terms of pushing back against unethical decisions, it turns into hiring people for their willingness to conform to what they are told.
> It's fine for the CEO to say, for instance, "Ordinarily I would have put the brakes on this via this particular means, but I failed to notice because of this unexpected circumstance. I'm sorry and this is how I'm going to make sure I notice and make the right decision next time."
Definitely. But you only get to use that excuse so many times before it starts to lose credibility.
> That is't too far off from what was actually said, actually
Here I disagree. To his credit, Ammon has taken full personal responsibility for pushing this through, even over internal objections. It’s not a failure to notice something that happened when you’re the one doing the thing.
The resolution is also more personal than procedural: be more conscientious about your users and listen to people who object to your ideas. Demonstrate that you can do that over time and you can regain trust.
Potential business processes include "ask about ethics as part of culture fit, and have a good sense of what you mean by 'ethics'," "ask about ethics as part of promo / do not count projects that put user data at risk towards promo," "vet investors for their ethics and see how their other investments are doing before allowing them to take a board seat," etc.
An ethical CEO will probably be doing many of these anyway, which is fine. You don't need to formalize them. It's fine for the CEO to say, for instance, "Ordinarily I would have put the brakes on this via this particular means, but I failed to notice because of this unexpected circumstance. I'm sorry and this is how I'm going to make sure I notice and make the right decision next time." (That is't too far off from what was actually said, actually, except for the bit about how to make decision-making more robust in the future. Everyone, ethical or not, fails to live up to their expectations of themselves at least occasionally.)