This morning I heard my husband complain about his English muffins.  “When they pop up in the toaster I need something to pull them out with,” he moaned.  “Could they make them any smaller?”

What a coincidence.  Today, I read a great article by Patricia J. Harned, President of Ethics Resource Center.  It’s in the current edition of their newsletter (click here to get a free subscription).  The article discusses the downsizing of consumer products, or the “grocery shrink ray.”  Like my husband, you’ve probably noticed this phenomenon yourself.

A bag of potato chips doesn’t go as far as it used to.  Cereal boxes hold less cereal and a pound of coffee has become lighter.  Things are not the way they used to be and it has nothing to do with us getting older and the good old days.

Product size really has shrunk in response to cost control measures.  Ingredients have also been substituted.  Harned notes that Hershey is using vegetable oil in some of its chocolates instead of the more costly cocoa butter and that General Mills is using walnuts instead of pecans in its turtle cookies.

Now if the companies were to print 16 ounces on packaging or advertising and deliver less than the claimed amount they would have a legal problem.  It would be viewed as a misrepresentation and a suit could be crafted along the lines of false advertising or some type of consumer fraud.

Yet if you look carefully at these new packages you’ll see that the legal ducks are probably in a row.  You may be expecting a pound, but the package says 13.5 ounces.  That’s what they advertise and that’s they deliver.  They’re legally safe.

Despite the legalities, consumers are still angry.  They’ve come to expect a 16 ounce pound of coffee and that presents an ethical problem.  Why?  Because when products are improved or increased in size you can count on those benefits being promoted in various types of consumer communications.  Downsizing is not.  It’s done behind the scenes with new artwork that nobody notices until they’ve already felt cheated.

Managing consumer expectations well requires more than technical legal accuracy, although that’s a vital part because without that accuracy, or compliance, you’ve breached a legal duty and given consumers a cause of action and reason to sue.

No, keeping consumers happy takes more than that.  People want to trust their brands.  Gamesmanship with product quality or quantity in the hope that no one will notice and if they do you can blame them for not reading the package is not a good thing.  The lack of transparency pisses people off. 

Legal compliance and ethics may overlap, but they are not interchangable.  They are not the same thing.  Compliance represents a minimal performance baseline.  Ethics takes performance and accountability to a higher level. 

What plane does your company operate on?  Is there room for improvement?  If so, what step should be taken and what’s stopping you?

It’s hard to digest the Wall Street headlines of the past week:  Lehman filed for bankruptcy, AIG got a huge loan and Uncle Same as a business partner, Merrill Lynch got a new home, and other bank merger talks were in high gear.

It’s the latest after shock of the collapsed U.S. hosing (sic) market.  It’s a collapse that has led to foreclosures of brick and mortar homes and now the collapse of Wall Street’s house of cards.

Some fingers wag and point to the “Housing Bubble” as the source of all our woes, as if there is a Mr. Bubble* out there plotting and planning the demise of Western capitalism by giving us all a “bath.”  Others point to insufficient regulation.  The situation appears hopelessly tangled to Main Streeters, and to a few Wall Streeters too.  But there is probably one thing we can all agree on: we feel betrayed.

There has been a colossal breach of trust involving obscene amounts of money.  Tax payers are now being asked to foot the bill for a financial frat party while those who work at the other end of the salary/bonus food chain are losing their homes and struggling to keep gas tanks full.

Last week I found an interesting piece by Michael E. Lewitt shortly after the Bear Stearns fiasco last Spring.  As an industry insider, Mr. Lewitt provides a fascinating look behind the scenes.  He points to short sightedness, excess leverage in unregulated activities (sounds like Enron’s off the books accounting, doesn’t it?), as well as a narrowly focused notion of fiduciary duty as part of the problem.  The structural problems we’re facing, he says boil down to “bad economic policies and bad political values.”

The blame game will no doubt continue for the next 18 months or more while our policy makers in Washington, including the new administration, figure out what to do.  If Enron and Worldcom have us Sarbanes-Oxley, you can be sure that this debacle will bring additional regulation and oversight too.  It’s merely a question of when.

So what does all this stuff on Wall Street have to do with Main Street and your day-to-day business activities?  Well, it’s food for thought on several fronts:

1.  To what extent is your business turning a blind eye to the ethics of certain profitable activities?  Is overconfidence creating a business blind spot?  Relying, for example, on lax enforcement of certain regulations or the fact that there are no regulations can backfire.  Being accountable to a government regulator is no fun.  But having one look over your shoulder and help you make business decisions, as AIG is about to find out, is even less fun.  Yet, that’s exactly what happens in deferred prosecution agreements.  Big Brother won’t prosecute, but in exchange they become your business “partner” until there is sufficient confidence that you have the necessary systems in place to “do the right thing.”

2.  To what extent are lawyers giving their clients the green light on whatever they want just to keep the clients happy and make a few bucks?  Take for example the case of the alleged Ernst & Young tax shelter fraud:  Wealthy clients asked friendly law firms to write opinion letters assuring them that their tax shelters were “likely” to survive scrutiny if the IRS challenged their legality.  One big firm lawyer has already pleaded guilty to tax fraud charges, another has paid the IRS $39.4 million to avoid criminal charges and his lawyer says his client and the accounting execs were “only guilty of greed.”  He makes it sound like a temporary head cold instead of the character flaw that it is.

3.  To what extent is your business tying compensation to short-term performance and encouraging risky behaviors that jeopardize long term stability?  Take a moment to stand back and examine your business policies and the behaviors they are driving.  Could they be improved to better align company actions with sound business practices and good decision making.

Let’s keep the bubbles in the tub.

*Mr. Bubble is a registered trademark of Ascendia Brands.