Was Wal-Mart's Ethics Policy Part Of The Problem?
By Felix Salmon: Back in November 2006, Eduardo Castro-Wright, who was then the US president of Walmart (WMT), dispatched the company's jet to pick up marketing head Julie Roehm in Chicago. She arrived late, in an ice storm, but made it in to the Walmart headquarters, where Castro-Wright started grilling her on the agency review process: how she had picked DraftFCB as the agency which would take over Walmart's $1 billion-per-year account. Roehm had interviewed some 30 agencies before settling on Draft; the questions centered on whether she had allowed any of those agencies to pay for dinner while she was talking to them, and whether she had accepted a lift in the car of any of the agencies' CEOs.Four days later, Roehm was fired, for violations of Walmart's extremely strict ethics policy. As Walmart expert Charles Fishman explains,
Wal-Mart had a kind of unbending almost obsessive adherence to even the trivialistComplete Story »
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