Business and Ethics

[Scotty71]

Is it unreasonable to expect businesses to be run ethically and honestly? I don't mean we all have to wear hemp, buy fairtrade and wear flip flops, but rather treat suppliers / customers and staff in the way we'd like to be treated?

I've just posted a thread on the legal forum regarding an employee who's recently worked for a large local SEO company and her tales are shocking. They sign customers up to expensive contracts and do nothing, threaten those customers if they dare to leave bad reviews, don't pay their staff...the list is endless and very uncomfortable.

Am I just being old fashioned in thinking this is completely wrong?

 

[jv43]

I'm not sure if i'll answer your question but I had a great CSR teacher recently who worked with Henry Mintzberg and gave me a completely different perspective on the issue of unethical business.

He tried to move away from the idea of personality being responsible for immoral business and to focus on the importance of context. What he means by this is that if 97 people out of 100 act immorally when put in a certain context, the problem is not the personality but the context. It might seem obvious to focus on the context yet we all too often think these problems are the results of greed or immoral people.
The question he asked was "What kind of context will make moral people act immorally?"
( If of interest to you this was very well explained by Psychologist Phillip Zimbardo's experiment with the Stanford prison experiment)
The point I'm getting to is that if we only measure the success of a business on a stock market by it's financial performance, it creates a context where it's unlikely that a CEO and any employee under him is able to focus on ethical business. If a manager who is in a very competitive company where he needs to perform to keep his job, the day he has to choose between profits and ethics, knowing that there is no incentives to make him choose ethics (probably not even social, as people might just call him a hippie), more often than not he will pick profits. The context is wrong.

Some people will argue that it makes business sense to be ethical i.e. that being ethical brings more money (Porter for example with Shared Value). Although we can find examples where this has been true, it's also possible to find a number of counter examples. If consumers had perfect knowledge of what they were buying being ethical would make business sense but good marketing is often enough. Further, this seems to be focused only on businesses who sell to consumers. Business to business businesses probably don't even need to consider "looking ethical".

To conclude as long as we don't change the context it's not unreasonable but it unlikely to see the majority to act very morally, simply because they have in many businesses there is such pressure to focus on profits, that theirs little time left for employees or CEO to think of something else.

If of interest to you we're working on a interesting experiment to change the concept. Feel free to send me a personal message if you want to here more.

Sorry for the long answer

 

[JEREMY HAWKE]

Scotty you have to do what you have to do ..Or you may not be around to actually do anything

 

[Excel Expert]

I have walked away from jobs for companies that I think are unethical. For example I have walked away from jobs for tobacco companies and jobs for governments that have bad human rights records. We often get requests to create tools to scrape information and data from other peoples websites - we always turn them down as well.

Ethics can be personal. My mother died of smoking related illness after spending a lifetime trying to give them up, as a result I will not deal with tobacco companies. Other people who have not gone through that experience or are pro-smoking wont see it that way (nor would I expect them to)

 

[jv43]

I have walked away from jobs for companies that I think are unethical. For example I have walked away from jobs for tobacco companies and jobs for governments that have bad human rights records. We often get requests to create tools to scrape information and data from other peoples websites - we always turn them down as well.

Ethics can be personal. My mother died of smoking related illness after spending a lifetime trying to give them up, as a result I will not deal with tobacco companies. Other people who have not gone through that experience or are pro-smoking wont see it that way (nor would I expect them to)

I think "what is ethical and what isn't" comes after the question put forward above i.e. "does the context encourage ethical or unethical behaviour?" If people are trying and thinking how to be ethical in their everyday actions that's already start. If we take the example of the SEO company, I don't think they were trying to be ethical and felt that this was the best approach. I don't think neither that they're all mean people. I think most probably like in many corporation, the company didn't give them any chance to think or try to be ethical.

Now for your example, many people made good ethical choices in their lives but the question for me remains: will most people be able to tell their boss "no, I'm putting this million dollars deal on hold because I want to investigate further, to know if this deal might have a negative environmental impact ". He'd probably be called "mental" and fired on the spot. Not an easy call.

Look even Tim Cook got attacked by a shareholder for being too green. Thank god he's considered so good that he can hold his ground in front of such remarks, but the average CEO... he better be able to explain to the dollar how it will bring a return on investment to shareholders, if not he keeps pushing for a green agenda, it's his job on the line. So what do you do when the higher profits are not in the green choice but in the generally agreed unethical one?