Peter York: 'Nice': it's still a dirty word in the boardroom

Are you 100 per cent transparent? Have your kiddies done their Corporate Social Responsibility homework modules? Have you had your impacts measured? Corporate presentation is a fashion business like any other. Top corporate people pick up fashionable ideas all over the place – from business pages, from conferences and from the consultants and communicators they pay to give them ideas.

And since Enron collapsed, they've been very worried about catching up with the latest fashions in responsibility, sustainability and all-round upright behaviour. Senior business folk are finding the way to the golf club blocked by brain-teasers like CSR, environmental impacts, globalisation and governance. And there's a world recession on too. There's a new vocabulary to learn. There are codes and taskforces and new appointments – Vice- President for Appropriate Humility – to fix.

And some old embarrassments have to be removed PDQ.

Like that chief executive who, back in 1998, wowed the analysts with The Big Story about new technology driving Customer Relationship Management and drastically reduced costs from a new world sourcing programme (which proved to be Indonesian child workers). Well, he's a liability now. No matter that he's learnt the book and he's eagerly quoting the speech Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard made last week at the CBI conference about having to get good behaviour into the DNA of the company. The analysts – deeply sensitive themselves now – regard him as a reputational risk.

Yet many managers still believe in their hearts that CSR is a stick for business-hating sickos in government and the NGOs – people who've never taken an entrepreneurial risk in their lives – to beat them with. That's why the rhetoric for CSR is concerned to prove that responsibility is really good business, that Nice Companies do well.

But where does that leave a business with a massive moral design fault – like making cigarettes or owning factories in a country with a repressive regime? What the social commentator Richard D North calls the Confess, Consult, Cringe mantra isn't enough then. Nor is local activity. Enron was awash with local niceness initiatives in Houston.

It would help if chief executives learnt to be boring again (it should come naturally to some). It would help if they learnt to own up when they've got it wrong, not 18 months later. It would help if business leaders stayed in place a bit longer – it's currently three years on average – so they weren't just planning their exit at the top of the market. And it would help if corporate cultures were more than lash-ups created by successive waves of mergers and by shareholder pressure, rather than by shared experiences and ideas.