Video transcript
Stanford eCorner Hiring Ethical People Frank Levinson, Finisar Corporation October 31, 2001
The personalities of team members and the culture of the company are vital to its success, says Levinson. An unethical member of the team can cause stress, tension, and ultimately division within the company.
Transcript
You mentioned this issue of being super ethical which ethics is a big buzzword but don't your really mean being moral like don't like, cheat and steal, be decent to people? Isn't that what really animates our good organization, people are just decent. They don't think about it. They just do the right thing. Yes. One of the things that Jerry says to people in our company that we try to do is we try to hire nice people and it sounds really trite but it isn't. We still even though we're now more than 1,000 people everything is done in small teams and the dynamics of a small team are that either people really get along well with each other or they don't. So somebody's that got a big ego or got to have things his way to make the job satisfying wrecks it for everybody around him. So I think it's both being very ethical but moral has a broader connotation to it. Just generally being nice. I use the term even caring about one another, it's important.
We try pretty hard not to have people work 100 hours a week at our company. That doesn't mean that almost everybody doesn't work 50 or 60 hours a week. They probably do, but for people who really work a lot more than that, real work, not the commuting time back and forth, not the time eating, there's no time for any real life. We want people when they join us to stay for a long time. Yes, I think moral is a broader context to the same thing. Thank you. Just on that follow up with respect to your clients, you said something that is part of an academic debate but it seems real when we talk of in some parts the academy without rules versus standards. It seemed that's what that issue of moral gets back to like it's a standard when you pride a good product to someone you stand behind that product. It's better than the rest of the market because you stand by it, you think it's good and you know you meet the standard. I think you're right.
I know that I think up until 1998 there wasn't a single product that anybody ever shipped back to us we didn't replace. I mean sometimes they ship them back five years later. We never even talked about warranties. We just said okay, we agree. The reason mainly was because we made some horrible mistakes and finally, the people even sent those back. Yes, it's just a way of doing business. The whole goal of business is to weld customers to you and part of what does that is just treating them as you'd like to be treated or more.
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