Tag: Business Ethics

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By Alexis Bonari

[Editor’s note: Yes, this is fairly elementary—but it’s nice to be reminded of the basics once in a while. If this topic interests you and you want more depth, I recommend Stephen M.R. Covey’s Speed of Trust as well as my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).
—Shel Horowitz]

In our ultra-competitive business world, it is easy to excuse treading on the wrong side of the line that separates necessary competition from sleazy behavior. The younger generation—those in their teens and twenties—have been bombarded with the idea that honor and ethics are relative terms. In other words, if everyone else appears to be cheating the system, it’s “ok” for me to do the same.

Do ethical people get left in the dust?

So, what really happens to businessmen and women who try to play by the rules of good business ethics? Do they get pushed aside by their more competitive, meaner contemporaries? The answer would appear to be “no”.

There’s a reason for everything.

Everything has a source, an origin. Even if we believe that ethics are relative, they still must come from somewhere. Our modern business ethics are founded on philosophical principals that date back hundreds, if not thousands of years. Humankind has continually refined these rules of conduct so that people can interact with each other in a positive, non-violent manner. Therefore, there is a practical, utilitarian purpose behind agreeing to a code of ethics.

It’s all about trust.

Essentially, we work together best when we feel that we can trust each other. Doing business is the ultimate form of working together. If an individual has questionable dealings in their past, it is highly likely that they will suffer some sort of backlash for it, be that publicly or privately. Take the executives at Enron as an example. They employed very aggressive, hyper-competitive strategies for amassing wealth. When investors felt they could be trusted, they were given huge sums of money. As their underhanded dealings came to light, they became the poster-children for unethical business practices and were reviled by a nation.

Although unethical business practices might result in short-term success, this rarely translates into stable business relationships in the long run. In this sense, those who choose to take a strong ethical stance generally come out ahead in the end.

Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at onlinedegrees.org, researching various online college degree programs. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, International Association of Green Marketers Tagged with , , , , , ,

As I’ve been publicly thinking out loud about forming the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers (a trade association for Green marketers), this article by Matthew Ammirati on MediaPost, “Is It Enough To Be Green? What About Being Good?” seems very timely.

The article asks whether we should…

…be buying an all-natural household cleaner in a recycled package but if the company has a team of migrants in Africa working in horrendous conditions in 18-hour shifts, does it really make you feel better about buying that product?

These kinds of questions come up regularly in my work the last decade or so, and they raise their heads again in thinking about how this organization will work. For instance, what happens if people who work on Walmart’s sustainability initiatives apply for membership?

Walmart has a lot of Green cred. They’ve done a tremendous amount in the past few years not only to make their own operations substantially Greener (and not coincidentally saving hundreds of millions of dollars. But there are many other aspects of their operation that are deeply troubling to me, and I don’t shop there.

I just looked again at the proposed behavior standards for membership–and I don’t see anything that would keep Walmart out. So if the organization were to adopt those standards, someone working on marketing Walmart’s sustainability initiatives would be welcome, as long as they were doing real Green marketing and not greenwashing. So would the conservative political consultant who has posted a couple of comments on these working drafts. Employees of a company such as Halliburton might have a much harder time proving they qualify.

What about a tougher case? Suppose someone has been involved with the sustainability initiatives over at BP (a company that actually at one point was fairly well regarded by mainstream environmentalists)? What about questions about supply chain and vendor practices and investing and charity programs and and and… Some kind of arbitration system will be needed to determine who qualifies and who does not. Any ideas for how to set that up?

In my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I very clearly and deliberately link ethical behavior and Green practices, and point out that the two combined are a powerful path to success. But the standards of behavior I’ve proposed for membership in this trade association are focused on the Green side and don’t really talk about ethics other than in a specifically Green context (e.g., no greenwashing). Should those broader issues be addressed? By whom, and who judges?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with , , ,

Yesterday’s edition of Christopher Baauer’s Weekly Ethics Thought newsletter bore a startling statistic:

43.8% of the surveyed companies said they would not refer uncovered fraud to law enforcement due to fears of bad publicity.

Wow! So these companies are potentially throwing away millions of dollars because they’re too ashamed of the bad press they’d receive.
Like Bauer, I say avoid the problem in the first place by having strong ethics programs in place from the get-go.

Of course, in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I make the case that strong ethics can actually be a profit center–but we’ll cut the bean-counters some slack and demonstrate that at least a culture of ethics has significant cost-control advantages.

His article isn’t on the Web, but here’s a link to Bauer’s site.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with , , ,

An open letter to Bernie Madoff (how appropriate, that last name!)

Dear Mr. Made-off

Was it worth it?
$50 billion in your pocket–but the rest of your life in jail and your name disgraced forever?

Was it worth it to have kicked the legs out from under some of the worthiest charities in the country, not to mention thousands of individual investors for some quick personal gain?

And why does anyone need $50 billion to begin with? Couldn’t you have lived lavishly enough stealing just a few million?

You are a disgrace to the business community! Thank goodness there are those who think differently about business, who accept the consequences of their actions, and who use business to advance the common good. Business at its best is a laboratory for innovation, a funnel for economic improvement, and the engine of the economy.

Bernard Madoff, How great you could have been if you’d used your considerable skills toward better ends! Do you feel any guilt and shame? Or just frustration that you got caught?

Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge.

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