Transparency

Thursday Oct 04, 2007

One of my favorite transgender jokes is that I ought to be able to lose weight easily by avoiding foods containing trans fats (a concept that works much better in theory than in practice). In fact, humor abounds when it comes "trans" prefixed words in English. I always smile when I see businesses proclaiming themselves to be "transmission specialists."

Transparency, however, is a pretty serious subject in the context of working for Sun.

Corporate transparency is all about being open and honest. It means telling people the truth about what you are doing, whether those people are shareholders, employees, partners or customers. Failure to do that has led to some impressive and broadly harmful corporate implosions over the last several years.

Transparency is also a part of the big picture of Social Responsibility, which covers a wide array of subjects including eco-responsibility, corporate governance, employee and supplier diversity, public policy and giving back to the community (which, at Sun, means everybody). It's all about doing the right thing. Consistently.

Sun really walks the walk on Social Responsibility. Not only is it in everything we do - from our business policies to our products - it is also in our objectives and our self-evaluation. Sun actually sets objectives for Social Responsibility, measures its success against those objectives and keeps raising the bar to drive constant improvement. You can see our most recent results in Sun's 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, which documents our objectives, our successes and our plans for the future.

So why am I blogging about this? Well, as an employee of the company, I think this is pretty cool stuff. It is the sort of thing that makes me proud to work at Sun. But the subject is also relevant because it applies so much to my situation. I transitioned on the job here at Sun, and they have "done the right thing" every step of the way. Further, they are happy to let others know about it... as demonstrated by the fact that there is a link to this blog in that report, under the Transparency subject of the Corporate Governance section.

So if you're reading this blog for the first time, and you got here from the CSR link, welcome.

(And if you want to see further evidence that Sun is proud about doing the right thing, there is an article about my workplace transition in the October edition of OutNow magazine, which you can find here (PDF).

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Posted at 02:18PM Oct 04, 2007 by kellym in Sun
Tags: blogging sun trans