Networking & Communications

Of course real-world business should be free of any ethical constraints and everyone show up at the meeting armed to the teeth ready to kill the guy with the most money in his pocket.

Prior to the meeting Networking will be important to obviate the need for ethics.

You will need to communicate your need for selfishly based support and dress well for the robbery.

As long as you kill everybody from the other company, who cares what the truth is? Your reputation will be secure.

P.S. Are you serious? Is this a trick question?

How do you define Business Ethics? When I googled, I found the following definition in Answers.com

"Moral principles concerning acceptable and unacceptable behavior by business people. Executives are supposed to maintain a high sense of values and conduct honest and fair practices with the public."

Sounds great! But, the terms acceptable, high sense of values, honest, fair practice are not fixed to use as a standard for comparing. They can be different in different businesses, countries and under different circumstances.

The term Business ethics is frequently used by the parties, especially by the powerful and the rich, fully to their advantage. For a poor person / country, ethics becomes secondary when it comes to survival.

I think as long as a person's actions / behaviour does not hurt / harm others to the extent they hate / curse you, whether in business or personal life, it is fine.

business and ethics a paradox? (or together a contradictio in terminis?)

Business ethics is an oxymoron! <Splutter>

true

Real-world business is a ethics-free zone, which is a good thing because it separates short-term winners (aka losers) from long-term winners.

The "real-world" winners always go by their ethics, otherwise they wouldn't of won.

To me it's ridiculously unreal that someone can actually have a long, successful and rewarding career by cheating.

Then again, there are lots of... lets say not so smart people that like to lie to themsleves, as well as to others. Guess is which of the two camps they end up?

It is Greed which corrupts the human being.Why are the big corporate executives are claiming bonuses in millions of dollars when their corporates have become bankrupt?. It is Selfishness.In business main objective is make more and more money forget ethics it is business of Saints.There are very few Saints in the business around the whole world.

Well Satyam means truth but its chairman was not speaking truth.

We have a special term for business without ethics: it's called "crime".

Also, when there's little or no chance of being caught: "the perfect crime".

In true economic terms, of course it is in the best interests of companies and their employees to conduct themselves ethically. Reputation, customer satisfaction, products you can take pride in: these are the foundations of long lasting stable business empires. It makes no sense to cheat the customer, or to risk your reputation by engaging in "sharp practices" against competitors.

But if the boom, bust, bankruptcy cycle is turned into an opportunity to profit and escape with the loot, or even to be afterwards feasted at the public trough, then the self-interested reason for ethics in business is gone. The crop of unethical business we are harvesting now, is due to these attitudes being fostered. Unscrupulous business has become the fat, stupid, ugly "spoiled brat" of the government.

One bad ethic leads to another: a little profit from cheating turns into fraud, theft, violence.... Spying and sabotaging competitors instead of developing talent and minding your own house, is the sort of "sharp practice" that makes sense to lazy, cheating profiteers. Organized crime flourishes in the loopholes that we leave them: and the economy is undermined.

I think you all miss the real point.

Morality is based on the principles of fairness, and right and wrong. We used to base our behavior on the Judeo-Christian beliefs. That has been stripped from society by the secularists that have managed to take over the government. These are the "free love, anything goes" teenagers from the mid to late '60's now in control. They had no morals then, they have no morals now. Why are you surprised?

Even if you are anti-religion you can just go back to the "ideal citizen" of Plato and you will have an example of the antithesis of the 'Leaders" we have today.

The answer is to return to the beliefs and morality of the American founding fathers.

I agree that principles have been largely abandoned, but it is instructive to investigate what the "founding fathers" believed. A recent good book is "Founding Faith", by Steven Waldman. Many would be surprised to find that what many think are the beliefs of the founders is distorted.

It isn't secularism that is the real problem, it's that people do not live up to what they profess. I would bet that many of the people who have helped cause the current economic crisis were raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Too many people go to church on Sunday but when they get out in the business world, take the attitude, this is just how the business world works -- it's dog eat dog and you just have to be tough, etc. And somehow greed becomes blurred into that perception. Isn't there some minister now who claims that "God wants you to be wealthy". I don't find that anywhere in Jesus' teachings... rather the opposite.

I think someone is missing the point. I agree that morality is based on the principles of fairness, and right and wrong. It is pretty clear however that these values long predate the Judeo-Christian belief system, they predate Socrates, and in fact seem to be present in our simian relatives: the chimps, gorillas, etc. Contrary to your implied assertion, the long haired 'free love' crowd of the 60's also believed in fairness, right and wrong, and in fact these beliefs were the core of the movement. They were reacting to parts of our culture that were interested in maintaining the outward appearance of morality while busily engaging in highly immoral and unfair practices. They perhaps understood sooner than many others, the difference between the core values of morality, and the accumulation of narrow minded puritanical, imperialistic, and conformist nonsense with which morality had become entangled.

No sex before marriage was in fact a very sensible policy in the millennia before the invention of birth control and antibiotics. There was a clear moral dimension to it as well: leaving a trail of one-parent children just to satisfy your sexual urges in immoral. Infecting your partner with an incurable and usually fatal STD is immoral. The problem with social conflict due to sexual jealousy also has a moral dimension, but in my experience as a long haired musician during this period, the 'free love' movement was at most a tiny sub-culture of a sub-culture. Even hippies understood that it was wrong and risky to nail your friend's partner. Maybe your experience is different, but to me it seemed like 'free love' was more an invention of Hollywood to titillate the masses than an actual social movement. What I saw was more like serial (if sometimes very brief) monogamy.

But that generation was hardly monolithic, and your assumption that it was the 'free love anything goes' portion of that generation that has undermined contemporary morality and business ethics is unlikely, unproven and probably unprovable.To me it seems most likely that it was the 'squares' of that generation that lurk behind the dismal current state of our business ethics, but I admit that there is no real 'proof' for this either.

Why bring in religion?. I know many highly religious persons of different faiths who are greedy,selfish and do not follow their religious teachings. It is individual who has his own character and follows what best suits him.

What seems so disingenuous to me is how "sorry" people like Madoff "are" once caught. But in all the years he was getting away with it "the pain I've caused" never entered his mind.

Business without ethics, the norm nowadays is set very low. I believe thats how ethics are set, they are not static but dynamic.

And there are people that will take ethics and grind it into the ground until they are caught. Then the norm trend will change in the other direction.

I hope it bottomed out.

My opinion,

At the low end of ethics, Attorneys are the first to test the waters on the low end of ethics, and last to leave.

GA from me.

I could not agree more with your statement. Ones character does not change just because one is in a work environment vs the rest of the world.

Bob

Greed vs ethics, odd I have never heard of a public schools system teaching ethics of any type. You are just expected to know that when you copy the actions of another it may have unintended consequences.

Granted many of us learned from our mistakes but the system teaches that if you don't get caught cheating it is ok. People who learn to scam the system are rewarded and people who actually could use some help are denied for lack of jumping through the hoops.

No cause and effect as a formal study. Why because teachers, parents and politicians as a group don't want to have their actions questioned by individuals that understand cause and effect.

Would Americans allow foreign banks to control their governments by the purse strings of fake money if they understood the causes and effects? Their money just took a 40% downward inflation and in time the effect will be evident but the cause will be missed.

Madoff was a small time player, the difference was he was caught because of the harm he caused was easily evident. His punishment should fit the crime. Strip him and his family of all value and put them on welfare in the ghetto with no source of other income. Just like he has done to many of his victims.

Long term wealth is the building of a holistic group that invests in itself and others. Short term wealth is greed at the loss of others.

Brad

I like what you are saying... GA.. and well informed too.

we must be learning from similar teachers.

Maybe Michael Douglass in the Movie "Wallstreet" did not mean "greed is Good" but "greed is god"

One of the issues we used to run into when I was with a multi-national was differing cultures definition of "ethical" behavior in business.

What was banned by the home office as vile and evil bribery was in some countries simply calculated as part of the salary.

On the other end of the spectrum, the GM plant outside Manilla finally decided never to open as the bribes they had paid to date and the projected future bribes ensured there would never be a profit.

Thats actually known as the norm's within a culture. At it can be vastly different, from each ends of the spectrum.

And norm's can change, or maybe I should say excepted norm's.

I believe that there are at least in the United States a very large number of businesses and individuals within those businesses that have very high ethical standards. Those ethics are observed at work, at home, at play, and if religiously inclined - at church. They contribute to the driving force behind millions of hours of donated labor (Volunteerism). They contribute to the quality of life we have enjoyed for many years. I also believe that the same basic qualities of goodness, honesty and ethical behavior exists in persons of ALL Nations, races, and ethnicities. It may not show in some cases due to governmental interference (Lack of Freedom), Societal restrictions, etc. I still believe that most people are honest, decent, caring individuals. We see the other kind plastered on the news because they are NOT the norm. The businesses that are destroyed by unethical behavior are news because they are out of the mainstream. Sometimes we lose focus because of the enormity of the damage caused by the bad eggs, and forget about the millions of hard-working, honorable people keeping the world turning. (A BIG OLD THANK YOU TO ALL YOU ENGINEERS IN THAT CATEGORY!) Richard

Yes you could be right for the most part. Bringing religion into it, I had worked for a company were the owner were born again christians.

Running a business, and being a good christian, lets just say Direction of the company waffered. But they were for the most part good people, so for the most part good christians, I'll leave it at that.

I think, one can not run a business and grow trying to maintain totally good ethics; otherwise, it becomes charity rather than business. The main aim of business is to make profit.

For example, to be ethical ideally a customer should be able to determine the price and `nominal' percentage of profit that the seller can charge him for the product that he intends to buy. In a capitalistic environment, this is not possible. In communism and socialism, theoretically this is possible, but we have seen them as breeding grounds of inefficiency, corruption, etc. ending with economical and social backwardness.

So, I can only say a person or a business has to set a limit to being unethical.

Whether in business or real life a person can live with pure ethics throughout his life only if he has inherited lots of money. Or many of us who now profess ethics may have accumulated a little wealth already being a little unethical in the early part of our life.

The religion or fear of God has nothing to do with ethics, it's only a person's conscience that matters.

I disagree with your definition of what is ethical between a producer and a consumer of a product.

to be ethical ideally a customer should be able to determine the price..

this is not right. In a production business, the price is determined by the cost of the product: materials, energy, production space, plus cost of labour, and cost of capitalizing the business has to be reckoned: for retail this cost price is generally doubled in order to account for the sales labour and overhead costs of the retail shop. Having a bit of experience in the retail, I've been satisfied that this is a fair way to price for the labour and space involved in selling.

Profit margin is the difference between market value and the sum of the above. Sometimes there's a high return on capitalizing the business; sometimes there's a bonus to the CEO or other admin for making it profitable by keeping costs down.

Some people want to prosper at the expense of others, because they are greedy: and this is the unethical option. If cost goes down because a)the material or process is cheap and crappy so the product is junk b) labour is exploited at unreasonable wages then this is unethical. If price goes up because there's a monopoly or a cartel that is fixing prices higher than they should be, this is unethical.

None of the facts of pricing are unethical per se, and there's nothing to keep a business or person from earning a living and prospering in ethical ways, while having complete freedom to determine the asking price for the product.

BUT, `nominal' percentage of profit that the seller can charge him is the kind of value that is possible to regulate, to address the problems created by monopolies and cartels. Healthy competition keeps prices within reason. The seller with the insanely inflated price will not find any buyers as long as ethical businesses are not squeezed out of the market.

Ethics trump Morality.

I have read an article on Mr.Nikola.Tesla great scientist. Please just read what it says:-

"Eager to begin, Tesla patiently waited for the messengers to call. Had he known more of the world around him, however, he would have stopped wait­ing. Shortly after Tesla's private demonstrations were concluded, Morgan's agent approached Tesla with a "business proposition". The bribe being siz­able, contracts would have placed Morgan in control of Tesla's new system. Tesla laughed at the pale little Mr. Brown in his pinching-tight tails, inform­ing him that he himself was already a millionaire. Why should he need such an affiliation at all? He was escorted very graciously by the amused Tesla.

While dining in the Waldorf several hours later, a rude interruption informed him that his laboratories were ablaze. The connection between his refusal to bow and the flames, which now reached skyward, was not made until all was consumed. That night, the world changed completely for Nikola Tesla. He lost everything of his past. Everything. The totality of his techno­logical achievements were burned into vapor. Books, priceless souvenirs, delicate equipment, patents, models, drawings, new pieces of apparatus. Ev­erything was burned. He read the message well. "

So where were the business ethics?.

Suresh Sharma.