Altria Group executive David Greenberg visited the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration Tuesday night to address corporate responsibility and ethics as part of Tuck's business fireside chat series. Altria Group is the parent company of cigarette firms Philip Morris International, Philip Morris USA and Kraft Foods.
Greenberg provided attendees, consisting of approximately 60 Tuck students and professors, with goodie bags of Kraft products as they gathered for his informal address and lively question-and-answer session.
Tuck's fireside chat series reportedly aims to bring top-level executives to campus in order to link classroom sessions with company-specific applications in a casual environment.
During the chat, Greenberg made a point of addressing whether companies and industries can claim they are ethical given the nature of their products. This issue is close at heart for the Altria Group, which holds 19 percent of the world's tobacco market share.
"I think you can be a responsible and ethical company as long as you're making a legal product and trying to figure out what society expects of you," Greenberg said. "We think there's a responsible way to be a manufacturer of cigarettes, and that's what we're trying to do."
Over the last seven years, Altria has spent over $600 million to prevent youth smoking, Greenberg said. In addition, it has invested $2 billion to research making cigarettes less harmful to health.
Greenberg confronted the question of why the company produces cigarettes at all, if acknowledging its dangers, by characterizing Philip Morris in the context of the cigarette market as a whole.
"If we went out of the business, would that end the business?" Greenberg asked. "Us stopping wouldn't change everything."
With the relevance of corporate scandals in today's world, there has been an increasing interest in approaching the provocative topic of business ethics, Greenberg said in an interview with The Dartmouth. In recent months he has visited the business schools at Harvard, Berkeley and the University of Southern California.
"Most companies have an interest in having executives out there talking to the public," Greenberg said.
In the wake of recent corporate scandal, Altria's subsidiaries are implementing several new programs to educate employees on appropriate corporate behavior, Greenberg said.
The group recently developed a new code of conduct to inform employees of company rules and principles while it also provided information on where to receive help if employees spot a problem.
According to Greenberg, similar precautionary programs are increasingly common in the corporate world in light of the recent upsets.
"Since all the scandals -- Enron, WorldCom, Tyco -- more and more companies are developing programs like this," he said.
Altria has applied these ethical standards not only to Phillip Morris but also to one of the group's more benign subsidiaries: Kraft Foods. According to Greenberg, Kraft, whose products include Oreos and Lunchables, faces issues of moral behavior in relation to health and is working hard on issues such as childhood obesity.
Greenberg is unique in having attended both law and business schools without ever having graduated college.
Now, as Altria's senior vice president and chief compliance officer, he has joined the effort to promote corporate citizenry by addressing numerous business schools across the country and running programs within the Altria divisions.
The fact that so many different products are being criticized, including those produced by companies other than Altria Group, causes Greenberg to wonder which products society will tolerate and which it will not.
"If you're going to ban products, where do you draw the line?" Greenberg asked.
