Ethics Resource Center

Published: March 25, 2010

ERC Honors the Late Carol Marshall with the 2009 Pace Award

The Ethics Resource Center awarded its 2009 Pace Award to the late Carol Marshall earlier this year in a ceremony that was partly a celebration of ethical leadership and partly a memorial and homage for a beloved and respected former colleague.

Ms. Marshall, who died in September 2009 of pancreatic cancer at age 56, was an attorney and tireless promoter of business ethics at Lockheed Martin and MCI, where she had worked, and among her many consulting clients.  She was an ERC board member from 2005 to 2007 and a former chair of ERC's Fellows Program.

The award was presented to Ms. Marshall’s family at a January 21 dinner of the ERC Fellows in Washington, D.C., in a room full of her friends and admirers, both Fellows and invited guests from the defense industry and the Defense Department.

General Dynamics and ERC launched the award in 1999 in recognition of Stanley C. Pace, former CEO and chairman of General Dynamics. The award honors an individual, or group of individuals, recognized as having unwavering integrity and having demonstrated moral vision and the ability to translate that vision into specific goals.

Among the speakers was Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, who praised Ms. Marshall as " the gatekeeper for the most important asset that any company or any person has and that is their reputation."   He described the mid-1990s merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta, during which all or parts of 17 companies were consolidated and Ms. Marshall was selected to help set the ethical tone and chart the ethical course of the new company.

"I need not say how important this is if you have a company with, as I recall, about 180,000 people, any one of whom can put you in the headlines at any time," Augustine said. " Protect our reputation she did."

He drew appreciative laughter with his description of a brainchild of Ms. Marshall’s at Lockheed Martin – to create an in-house training film and an ethics board game using characters from the syndicated comic strip "Dilbert" by the artist Scott Adams, who granted permission to use the characters free of charge.

Lockheed Martin later gave away hundreds of copies of the successful board game.

ERC President Patricia J. Harned in her remarks imagined what a Pace Award acceptance speech by Ms. Marshall might have entailed.

"First, I know she would thank Norm for allowing her to take those early risks that could have flopped as easily as they flew," Harned said. " She would definitely thank her family.

"She'd turn the microphone into a bully pulpit and she'd deliver somewhat of a sermon. She'd talk about how important it is to focus on ethics, not just compliance; set the tone from the top but also let it bubble up from the bottom.  I think she'd ask us all her questions, like 'Are you making ethics a part of the life blood of your organization? Are you changing hearts and minds or are you checking boxes?'

"Here's what she said when I asked her about why as a successful lawyer you chose to go into the field of ethics.  She said, 'I found that there were a lot of people out there that wanted to do the right thing but didn’t know what the right thing was to do.  They were just looking for rules and regulations and policies and procedures.  I just had this fundamental belief that it's more than that.  If you can get people to understand the most important thing that they need to do is to know what their personal ethical underpinnings are and bring that to work with them, then you'’d be a huge success.  Then you could pile all the rules and regulations on top of that, but fundamentally business ethics is really just letting people be who they are.'"

The Pace Award was accepted by Frank Marshall, Carol Marshall’s husband, her daughter Christine Maginnis, her son-in-law Erik Maginnis and her son Andrew Marshall.

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In This Issue

• The Importance of Leadership in Times of Crisis. Column By Patricia J. Harned, Ph.D. President, ERC
• Patricia J Harned, ERC President, testifies before the United States Sentencing Commission
  
• The Dark Side: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business. Book Review By Kyle Goetschius
  
• A Case for Cooperation: the Defense Industry Initiative
• ERC Honors the Late Carol Marshall with the 2009 Pace Award
• January Fellows Meeting Retrospective