with a clear conscience. Responsibility practiced at individual level becomes vibrant, long-term responsibility for the company, for colleagues, for the company’s customers, and for society. Clearly, integrity can also make daily business and Group divisions. At all levels in our company. For both colleagues and customers all over the world. Board decisions taken in any company can have far-reaching consequences, and in the event they prove wrong, can pose a direct threat to the company’s survival. Indirectly, though, the success and continued existence of a company also depend on whether its employees base their conduct and thus their actions on their own conviction of “right” and “wrong.” And finally, a company will only endure if its customers remain convinced that the products are morally acceptable and beneficial to the wider community. If a company and its employees merely restrict themselves to pursuing their own agenda, that eventually takes its toll on customer benefit – one might even say on customer trust. Internal and external control or sanctioning systems, an effective compliance management system, and easily comprehensible guidelines that employees are familiar with are important. Even more important, though, is our selfperception of our day-to-day actions. Ultimately, it is employees themselves who know whether they have given their very best, or whether they have acted according to their conscience. Integrity is much more than just a word. Integrity does not depend on hierarchy levels. Integrity brings corporate values to life, it makes trustful collaboration possible, and it enables our managers at all levels to answer for their decisions “Integrity brings corporate values to life.” more complicated, given that it could require passing up potential opportunities for income and profit that may be legal, but are no longer legitimate. The voluntary commitment given by a company to forgo certain profit opportunities for ethical reasons expresses a basic attitude. Integrity therefore demands steadfastness. But employees will only demonstrate this quality if they feel they will not suffer any disadvantage by so doing. This is why the conduct of the Board of Management is so crucial. The Board’s words – and above all, its actions – must convey that it respects, expects, and encourages integrity. Personnel selection and development must reflect this, too. Only then is there a real likelihood that decisions taken by the company’s middle and lower management will be driven by integrity. However, even that is no guarantee. In the mid-1960s, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, the prominent philosopher of law, wrote, “The liberal secular state lives on premises that it cannot itself guarantee.” This dictum ultimately also holds true for companies, and has not lost its relevance to the present day. To use a word that has sadly gone out of fashion, companies today still depend on the quality of virtue in their employees – in the best sense of the word. And that is exactly what integrity means. Integrity imposes limits on business rationale, at least in the short and medium term. That is why our company’s executive management has underscored the central role of integrity by firmly anchoring the mission to become a role model for the environment, safety, and integrity in the Volkswagen Group’s TOGETHER – Strategy 2025. One element of this mission is that our Group takes responsibility for the common good – in other words, that it assumes social responsibility. The crucial factor here is that this corporate social responsibility does not merely find expression in well-meaning but superficial gestures, but is practiced in harmony with our corporate strategy. Only then does CSR become credible 80
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