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Ethical behavior key to successful business, Lockheed CEO tells TSU audience

    The recent high-profile bankruptcies of Enron and Global Crossing highlight the importance of ethical business philosophies, Lockheed Martin Corp. board chairman and chief executive officer Dr. Vance D. Coffman told a Troy State University audience today.
   Coffman spoke to more than 300 students, faculty and guests as part of the Sorrell College of Business Speaker Series. The event, which is designed to expose students to outstanding business leaders, was held in the Adams Center Theatre on the TSU campus.
   Suspicions of legal and ethical lapses have surrounded the billion-dollar bankruptcies of Texas-based energy company Enron and international telecommunication company Global Crossing, Coffman said. But their activities should not condemn the rest of the business world, he said.
   “Ethical behavior is the foundation of all successful businesses,” he said. “If a business embraces a philosophy of cutting corners or ‘cooking the books,’ its activities will become apparent over time. Rest assured that at some point, there will be a reckoning.”
   Lockheed Martin, which employs 125,000 people worldwide and had sales of $24 billion in 2001, specializes in the development of advanced technology systems and products for the defense, space and aeronautics industries. Coffman noted that the defense industry suffered through its own ethics crisis in the early 1980s, when stories of vast cost overruns plagued both the U.S. government and defense contractors.
   “But there has been a considerable change in the public perception of the defense industry,” he said. “We are solid citizens now and are no longer the media’s whipping boy.”
   The change can be attributed, Coffman said, to an industry-wide commitment to the “highest level of ethical standards,” known as the Defense Industry Initiative of 1986.
   “That initiative has made a real difference in how the defense industry acts and behaves and is now being replicated in other businesses across the country,” he said. “Ethics are the glue that holds us together.”