Dell Steps Up To 100 Percent Transparency, Asks Suppliers To Do The Same

Dell (a GCI client) made me proud today. Why? Because the folks at Dell did the right thing.

They announced a comprehensive online communications policy for its employees and its representatives and suppliers. Essentially, they extended and raised the bar of Dell’s code of conduct for online communications and committed to 100 percent transparency. Dell is the first major company to take this step. Andy Sernovitz, the CEO of WOMMA, is at Dell today to lend support and announce a new ethics tool kit.

We provided some input to the extended policy. It was interested to watch how quickly Dell made all this happen. Discussions on 100 percent transparency started with the HP pretexting controversy and came to a head around the time of Edelman’s misstep. Apple’s “masked blogger” was getting some attention, too. More than a third of Dell’s revenue comes from dell.com. They want to make sure people can trust online venues.

On Oct. 21 the idea of raising the bar for Dell’s employees and suppliers was raised with Dell’s leadership. It took them less than 10 minutes to approve it on a Saturday afternoon.

By Oct. 23, the extended policy had been drafted and was circulated for approval by Dell’s GEMC, procurement group, legal, HR, etc. In my own mind I thought any policy that impacts Dell’s suppliers would take a while to review. I was wrong. 24-hours later the extended policy was approved with hardly a word changed.

The same day, Oct. 24, we called Andy to ensure the policy met WOMMA’s standards. It more than met WOMMA’s standards.
Dell made the announcement today at 11 am CST. That is about 14 working days after they decided to do it. That’s pretty quick for a Fortune 25, $55 billion company.

In any case, Dell is doing the right thing. Other companies should follow. WOMMA’s tool kit and Dell’s policy are good places to start.

9 November 2006 | Best practice, Client, Dell, Ethics | Comments