Product Description

In the corporate jungle inhabited by Enrons and WorldComs, a lack of transparency is the root of all scandal, yet delivering transparency seems immensely difficult with the often competing interests of shareholders, corporate boards, government regulators and other stakeholders. Drawing on a vast wealth of real-life examples from the commercial world, this lively business book goes in search of the appropriate limits of transparency. From commercial confidentiality to the ethics of marketing to lobbying and corporate corruption, the author addresses the position, significance and limits of transparency in modern corporate life, and works through the dilemmas that the increasing calls for transparency present. From the secrets of the Board Room to the struggles of NGOs, transparency is a persistent challenge - how much is enough? How much do we need? How do we do it? This book, ideally suited to business leaders and managers, consultants and business students alike, addresses these questions and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #403410 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 184 pages

Review
"* 'Transparency is a precondition of effective accountability, and [Henriques] provides a timely and compelling account of the state of corporate transparency today' Jonathon Porritt, author of Capitalism as if the World Matters * 'We are entitled to know what companies do. This important and timely book examines the scope and limits of transparency, intelligently confronting the challenges and problems it poses' Sir Geoffrey Chandler CBE, Founder-Chair, Amnesty International UK Business Group 1991-2001, and former Director of Shell International"

John Christensen, Director, Tax Justice Network International Secretariat
This book will help business leaders understand the values and
principles which underpin business integrity.

David Nussbaum, CEO of Transparency International
This book is a timely exploration of what `transparency' entails,
the basis for expecting it of companies, and the limits which may apply.

Customer Reviews

should companies tell the truth- well it would make a change
All companies have secrets, the deals they do to win contracts, how they invent the products, how they manage their portfolios, all these are perfectly acceptable in the day to day work of the market. The area however gets greyer when its involves issues about supply chains, how much are the workers in the outsourced production units being paid, the environment- what is the companies true carbon footprint for example. The place where companies interact with Government is possibly one of the darkest of all, from behind the door lobbying to outright corruption and all the staging post in between- juts look at the on-going scandals about Party funding going on in 2007. Adrian Henriques starts out with the premise that corporate transparency is a `good' thing, for shareholders, company directors, wider stakeholders and ultimately for the companies themselves. He looks at the responsibilities a company has both to its shareholders and the society at large, where are the issues and what can and should be addressed. He also looks at what are the limits, competitive edge is very difficult to maintain in a totally open situation, where those limits should be. Transparency is at heart a question of communication, it is not enough to `databomb' interested parties with masses of useless info, nor on the other hand to create a world of shadows and mirrors where the truth, if it exists is so distorted it is unrecognisable. For Henriques, corporate transparency is about realising the full impact of a business, and identifying the stakeholders effected- and then providing them with the information they need on how they are effected. This is one of the best books on what are the real communication responsibilities of a company and should be required reading for all public company directors, their PR team and the CSR crew.

Pleasant surprise: a substantive book about CSR (4+ stars)
All too often books about corporate social responsibility (CSR) are either dry academic tomes or else business-book fluff. This one is an exception. Not only is is a valuable survey of substantive topics in CSR, but it's readably and intelligently written.

The title and subtitle accurately indicate the limitations of the book's scope. It's neither a general survey of CSR, nor does it treat much of transparency issues outside the corporate context (e.g., in government policy-making). Most of the examples are drawn from a UK context.

Some of the topics are part of the standard CSR syllabus: stakeholders, the "triple bottom line" (the same author edited a good multi-author volume on this a couple of years ago), media issues and corruption. But what's novel is that the author puts these issues on a solid philosophical foundation, without sacrificing the book's practicality or clarity. The author ties the need for transparency to balancing conflicting interests among stakeholders, with the appropriate level of transparency depending on the type of conflict.

At a more detailed level, I can't remember the last business book I've read that (a) not only distingushes among virtue ethics, duty ethics and utilitarianism but provides very down-to-earth examples of each approach (@20-23), or (b) mentions either Kant or Habermas, much less both (albeit the latter in passing only, @165). The recent issues around search engine companies' cooperation with the Chinese government is nicely grounded in the context of a distinction between corruption and complicity (@158-160), and the discussion of the ethics of tax havens (@113ff) was new to me, at least.

I'd give this book a full 5 stars but I noticed that the discussion of some details about law, especially intellectual property and contracts, were a bit garbled (@130-135; also, the name of the US Alien Tort Claims Act is twice gotten wrong, @159 & 179). So my reduced rating comes out of a kind of "precautionary principle" that other details might be slightly off as well, especially ones relating to English and European matters with which I (as an American not living in Europe) am less familiar. But despite such possible fuzziness in some details, the book remains a useful and stimulating survey of corporate transparency issues.