A person's career ethics can be likened to a theoretical commercial skyscraper: It maximizes the prime real estate high up by widening at the top floors, rather than narrowing, and is continually being built and expanded. So said Kenneth Brown, Cornell graduate ('74 B.S., mechanical engineering) and president of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the leading international architectural, planning, engineering and interior design firm.
Brown was presenting the annual Bovay Lecture in the Bovay Program for the Study of History and Ethics of Professional Engineering April 13 in Hollister Hall.
"Your sense of ethics, integrity and professional standards have to change and broaden as you inevitably move into roles of greater responsibility, which are going to lead you into roles of leadership and management in business and organizational enterprises. You may not think that is where you're headed, but I think the world will demand that you head in those directions. You will not end up always just doing engineering," said Brown.
Brown's talk, "A World of Choice: Engineering Ethics and Integrity in Business," was co-sponsored by the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The Bovay Program was endowed five years ago by Cornell alumnus Harry Bovay ('36, chemical engineering) to encourage young students to appreciate the history of the engineering profession and to build a strong sense of guiding values as they pursue its practice.
Professional ethics are founded on values from childhood, Brown said, and continue to expand and broaden as a person goes through college, begins working as a professional and then enters management. "It's not an easy road to build this structure I'm talking about, and it doesn't end," he said, "but it is something that I think, if you build it through your career, if you build it broad and wide and see all the issues, then you will be very proud."
Brown continued: "In the end what you would like is something that you are not only proud of as your own personal career, but something from which you can teach others. That is really the great impact of having gone through this exercise, if by virtue of what you have done -- the experiences you have had and what you have stood for in your career -- you can actually help others do what is right and progress a little faster.
"So I encourage you, [take] every chance you get to broaden the floors of this structure, and then use it as a place literally to preach the cause of doing the right thing to as many people as you can. And then we will have an environment which we will all be more pleased to operate in."
Prior to joining SOM as its president last June, Brown was a vice president of General Electric Co., where he was responsible for company operations in Southeast Asia. He joined GE in 1992 as manager of business development for the company's electrical distribution and control business in Plainville, Conn. Brown was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned his M.A. in engineering science and economics.
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