On its menu the bank claimed the food on offer was as ethically sound and tasty as their business practices

A READER WAS recently invited to lunch in the private dining rooms at UBS in London. On the table in front of him was a menu listing what he was about to eat. Nothing odd about that, but then he flipped the card over and found a peculiar declaration printed on the back.

It is rather long, but I’m quoting it in full as it is the most extreme example I’ve ever seen of a company tripping up as it tries to prove how upstanding it is: “At UBS we promote a corporate culture that adheres to the highest ethical standards across all areas of our business.

“Our commitment to excellence in all we do, combined with a desire to understand and fulfil our clients’ requirements, translates into our client dining experience.

“That is why, where possible, our menus are crafted from the finest seasonal produce which is ethically sourced, organic and unsurpassed in quality and value. Just like our business.”

This is an object lesson in how not to do it. For a start, no organisation should ever announce in public that it is ethical. There is hardly a company left that does not do this, but it makes no sense. First, to do so is meaningless – what business would ever boast that it was unethical?

Second, it looks particularly comic coming from a bank that recently lost its CEO after Kweku Adoboli made $2.3 billion disappear in allegedly unauthorised trades, and which has been in trouble with US and British regulators.

Even sillier is to up the ante and claim not merely to be ethical but to have the “highest ethical standards”.

What are these? Are they meant to be the ones Mother Teresa would aspire to? If so, they would make most normal business activities quite impossible. They would mean never hiring anyone if you thought you might ever have to fire them and never trading with any other company for fear of contagion.

To declare a “commitment to excellence in all that we do” is another bad idea. To be competitive some things need to be done excellently while others only need to be done adequately. Good managers know the difference.

I need to try to write an excellent column (even though tests have shown I don’t always pull it off). I don’t need to be excellent at tidying my desk, or in replying to emails.

Even worse is the notion that ethics and excellence translate into “our client dining experience”. This dismal phrase sends the spirits into free fall. To refer to the “user experience” you have when trying out a new technical gadget is horrid, but to rename what used to be known as “lunch” a “client dining experience” is intolerable.

Then we learn that menus are “crafted” using the “finest seasonal produce” that is “organic” and “ethically sourced”. Even this standard food guff is misplaced. I fail to see why a business that flies its bankers all round the world at the drop of a hat should draw the line at importing the odd Kenyan green bean in the dead of winter. “Ethically sourced” is too vague to mean anything at all.

More worrying still is the idea that the food dished up to UBS customers is “unsurpassed in quality and value”. This is not just ugly, it could be illegal.

If the bank’s kitchens really are serving food of higher quality than anything ever produced before, the compliance people ought to take note. Such sublimely delicious client dining experiences would almost certainly fall foul of the new UK Bribery Act.

Yet the pièce de résistance in this meal of a declaration is the final sentence, which attempts to liken the whole business to the client dining experience.

I’ve read it three times and can’t avoid the conclusion that banking is meant to be organic and ethically sourced too.

I suppose you could say I’m getting too excited about this. After all, it’s just a paragraph written by some helpless twit in the catering department and so possibly doesn’t matter.

But it does matter. You need to worry when companies write witless things and hand them to their customers.

First, no customer is ever going to be moved by such hyped-up guff, unless to copy it out and forward it to me. Second, these declarations make one fear the bank is losing the plot generally.

Lunch must be allowed to be just lunch; something perfectly nice that you eat in the middle of the day while conducting a little light business.

As for ethics, any declarations should be limited to a list of all the unethical things that they don’t do – unauthorised trading for one – which should be regularly rammed down the throats of all staff.

The way to impress clients about being ethical is not to boast about it on the back of menus. It is to act it over lunch – and all the time.

– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012)