Bill Marriott, the Chairman of Marriott International, also happens to be a well-known cooperate blogger. From his 28th July 2014 entry, I came to realize that his company has been selected “World’s Most Ethical Company” for the 7th time in 8 years. This is definitely a marvelous achievement for his company. As I read his blog, I admire the way he views success, and the way he tries to create positive change to their community.
Bill Marriott, Chairman of Marriott International
According to Bill Marriott and other employees such as Bill Dempster, Marriott have had 87 years long worth of strong value-based traditions: they are well recognized by their stakeholders for their trust-worthiness, high respect for law, commitment to their global commitments and integrity. They are constantly trying to “fulfill expectations of the community”. Marriott have certainly worked really hard to be able to have drilled this brilliant reputation in the stakeholder’s mind.
Having read Bill’s blog and his goal to maintain a successful and good company, I think I finally understand that Freeman’s Stakeholder Theory may actually be applicable to reality, although obviously it will only apply for a very few firms; within those firms, they will always have imperfection, too. Before knowing about Marriott, I thought Freeman’s Stakeholder Theory is impossible to fulfill: all stakeholders may have different wants which could contradict each other thus the theory cannot hold; however now that I have read about Marriott’s business objective to fulfill all expectations of stakeholders, I learnt that as long as you work really hard for it, it may be done.
On the other hand, from Bill Dempster’s video, I see that their business’ ethical success not only rely on the company’s PR, but it also involves every single employee’s commitment to the global community and traditional culture of ethics: “it’s something that starts at the top of the company.” With this note, I hope that other companies such as Nike would be able to follow this ethical inspiration and not just set their minds on objectives such as increasing market share, maximizing profit… Even if a business achieves all these profit goals, I do not think a business is successful unless it’s doing things with good value and integrity.