Last summer, Steve Reinemund, got a surprise phone call from the CEO of Coca Cola thanking him for an enormous favor. But Reinemund, at the time the CEO of Pepsi Co., had no idea what that favor had been.
It turns out an unsuspecting Pepsi Co. administrative assistant received a package in the mail containing confidential Coca Cola documents. In keeping with Pepsi’s commitment to high ethical standards, the employee notified the appropriate company manger and the entire contents were immediately returned to Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta. Only two Pepsi employees were directly involved, and they both knew what they had to do right away. No executives at Pepsi so much as glanced at the secrets contained within that envelope.
Steve Reinemund recounted this story to a rapt group of 250 in February as an example of the type of integrity he believes is ”“”within the very DNA”of Pepsi’s corporate character.
Well, the employees really did Pepsi a favor more than Coke. I’ve taught corporate compliance for years and this is a classic example. Had the Pepsi employees read the confidential documents, or if it even appeared that they had (for example, the documents were opened) the company could have landed in HUGE legal trouble. And given that this package was delivered to them via a delivery company that keeps track of what is delivered to whom rather than, say, being found dropped next to a taxi stand, it would have been trivial for Coke to have figured out that Pepsi had the package.
Now, if they could have opened the package in some undetecatable way, photocopied the pages, carefully put them back, and then sent the package on to Pepsi, they might have gotten away with it. Anything else would have screwed them royally. Corporations teach their employees — if you see anything that appears to be confidential information belonging to a competitor, treat it like a ticking bomb and get away from it immediately! So this was pretty much automatic self-preservation.
When I was practicing law, one of my clients, a well known multi-national corporation, had a similar experience. One of its employees received a confidential notebook from a rival. The employee informed his boss who told the general counsel who called me. The upshot was that the notebook was locked in the general counsel’s office overnight, never looked at by anyone other than the first employee and returned to the other corporation by hand delivery the next day. The employee was screened on matters involving competition with the rival company for the following year.
Compare the ethical standards of Pepsi and my client with that of TEC. A couple of years ago, a confidential and legally privileged string of emails among several bishops and ACI and their lawyer concerning legal matters was inadvertently sent to an unintended recipient, who immediately forwarded them to an employee of the diocese of Washington at his diocesan email address. Rather than responding like the “cutthroat competitors,†Pepsi and my client, the TEC employee immediately arranged to have them published on a parish website by a TEC priest and also published in a local gay advocacy newspaper.
The priest involved iced the cake by referring to the bishops and ACI as “cretins.â€