How can businesses overcome ethical problems? �������� grad offers solutions

“Charlie the Tuna is killing Flipper!”

Well, sort of.

For decades, nets used in the commercial tuna industry trapped and drowned thousands of dolphins that swam near schools of tuna. In the face of public outcry, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) stepped in and worked with researchers to develop safer netting that drastically reduced dolphin deaths. In turn, companies like StarKist could label their canned tuna as dolphin-safe.

This is an example of what you can accomplish when civil society figures out how to work with a corporation, Owen Pell ’80, LLD ’11, told �������� School of Management students who filled the Anderson Center Osterhout Concert Theater on Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025, for the 36th annual Abraham J. Briloff Lecture on Accountability and Society.

Pell, president of the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities and retired partner from White & Case LLP in New York City, explored in his speech how companies struggle to address ethical or long-term environmental and social dilemmas and methods that have helped overcome those challenges.

He explained that businesses and corporations are amoral by design and have a principal duty to maximize shareholder profit, while NGOs engage in civil society activity. Even if a solution remains out of reach after these two entities partner, he said, the work can still prove worthwhile.

“What might seem like the solution to a human rights problem or environmental problem could very well change over time as you learn more about the problem,” Pell said. “The secret to finding a solution is to keep pursuing perfection. Accept that you may never attain it, but pursue it anyway. The pursuit will make things better over time.”

Pell cited historical examples to demonstrate amoral business practices once believed to be acceptable — child labor, pollution, segregation, even predatory social media content — but there are also proven approaches to improve the corporate perspective:

• Governmental regulations
• Changing outcome probabilities (considering the risk of a lawsuit over amoral behavior)
• Changing corporate behavior or values

“Companies care about shaming because they care about their market image, having a good corporate reputation and people coming to work for them. Most companies will also tell you they think they can outlast most (shaming), and that’s why boycotts generally don’t work, because they’re hard to sustain,” Pell said. “However, companies are beginning to realize that if they work sometimes with civil society (NGOs), they can get better business results.”

Pell noted how recent surveys of corporate entities show the advantages of partnering with NGOs:

• 66% see it driving innovation
• 66% see gaining access to knowledge
• 45% see enhanced corporate effectiveness

NGOs can also gain better access to local populations that understand an issue, Pell explained, and they are more effective at polling worldwide than corporate entities. One of the greatest fallacies about international development is how often top-down imposed solutions fail, in part because they’re economically impractical, he said. But when locals are asked what it could take to solve a given problem, they often say the problem doesn’t need an elaborate solution.

Pell cited the aftermath of the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, which killed 1,138 garment workers and injured 2,500 others, as a powerful example of what can be learned from this type of partnership.

The collapse sparked worldwide criticism of Western apparel companies and their subcontracting methods, leading to an accord involving European labor unions and the companies that would finance their building inspectors.

This opened the door for companies to cancel their subcontracts if the building didn’t pass muster, creating safer conditions.

“The NGOs agreed that the companies had not created this problem; local government really created the problem,” Pell said. “The NGOs agreed that this would not completely solve the problem, but everybody agreed that this was better than the status quo. It was an improvement that got the ball moving and has encouraged some change.”