Introduction
The beginning of the 21rst century started with big scandals that raised some issues on corporate governance responsibilities and on ethics policies inside companies. Some companies as a result of these scandals went out of business, letting thousands employees without a job. Everybody saw on TV, family’s interviews telling that they lost everything, not only their job, but also their pension funds and their savings placed to pay the university for their children. As a European I was completely shocked that such big companies and people that have invested in it (i.e. pension funds of Enron employees) lost everything within few weeks. I could not believe that upper management people could have acted that wrong. Before taking the course of Business ethics I was not sure what to expect about it because in Europe, ethics is not a course that is taught. Through the semester I learned a lot on ethics, and on managers’ and companies’ responsibilities. Below are the lessons I learned, the thoughts and the values that I think will mostly influence my decisions now and in the future not only as a manager but also as a human person.
What is a business for?
During the semester I developed a reflection on what a business is, what it is used for, and what are the implications of doing business. Before class I was seriously thinking of opening a business in order to make money. Now that the semester is over, I realize that a business is not only about money. It is also about people, socialization, and society.
• People inside a company are too often considered as a cost. To the contrary I believe that people inside a company should be considered as one of the greatest assets of the company. It is people that bring ideas, create products, and make the company works.• A company is an important element for the community and to a larger extent for the society in general. A company employs people that are members of the community. Employees have children that are also members of the community. Those members by receiving money from the company (wages) spend for example the money in the shops in town, go to the supermarkets, pay taxes, or make donations. Employees are also active members of the community by participating for instance to events or to associations. So a company contributes to the community through its employees.• A company can also be an active member of the community by acting itself. The company might make donations to the community.
The Dayton Hudson Corporation case is an amazing case that clearly underlined the fact that a business is not only a business it is also a part of a community. A community needs businesses just as businesses needs a community. They belong to each other, they depend to each other. They are linked together financially and by the people.The Enron and Arthur Andersen cases were important cases to see the problems that could arose from a lack of ethics of few people at the top. Personal ambition and financial gain are not what should drive a company. As a result of these scandals, the public opinion distrusted people at the top of the companies. The Enron scandal also revealed the danger of being obsessed by share price which conducts to an inevitable shortening of horizons.I would like to quote Charles Handy who wrote the article What’s a business for?, published in the Harvard Business Review in December 2002, which is very appealing to my conception of a business:“We need to eat to live, food is a necessary condition of life. But if we lived mainly to eat, making food a sufficient or sole purpose of life, we would become gross. The purpose of a business, in other word, is not to make a profit, full stop. It is to make profit so that the business can do something more or better. That “something” becomes the justification for the business. Owners know this. Investors needn’t care.”
Corporate Ethics Policies
By studying the cases of Enron and Arthur Andersen we saw that a lack or an unclear code of ethics can result to wrong behaviors. People inside the company might become confused and lost on the ethical decisions that they have to make. Having such a policy should lead to greater ethical awareness, consistency in application, and avoidance of ethical disasters.
Managers’ duties
This course was also a special occasion for me to think about manager duties. A manager has some duties to the persons working in the different levels of the hierarchy inside the company, to the consumers, to society, and to his profession.• A manager has a duty to well represent his company’s best interests. He should not dishonor the company in which he is working for. He should follow the rules that the company has put in place.• As a member of the company, the manager interacts with persons that are his/her subordinates, his/her peers, and his/her bosses. He has of course a duty to respect these persons. But he also has a duty to be honest and to inform what his actions to the persons working with him are.• A manager is also a member of a profession. Therefore he has some duties to his/her profession. By examining the Enron and Arthur Andersen cases I realized that the persons involved in the scandal not only involved their companies but also their profession. After those scandals the public opinion seriously distrusted the Accounting/Finance professions. Therefore accountants and financial people were starting to feel bad about their jobs. They were not sure anymore about what their jobs should be and what code of ethics to follow.
Realizing a professional oath was an exercise that helped me thinking about my duties and my responsibilities as a manager. Too often rules are imposed to people and they don’t feel concerned by something that they were not a part of. By realizing oneself an oath, it becomes much more important, it does make sense and it is easier to apply in practice. Since it has been realized by oneself it is much more difficult to lie to the commitments made to oneself. This exercise made me realize that if I open my own business in the future I will not force people to apply a code of ethics that I would have decided on my own. Instead I would prefer to empower people to create their own rules in order to make them feel more responsible of their acts. It is morally much harder to break the rules that we make by ourselves to ourselves. As mentions William May, “the society expects professionals to state publicly their own standards of excellence, to conform to those standards individually, and to enforce them upon colleagues within the guild.”Therefore a professional oath made by employees themselves is a great tool to build the standards of excellence mentioned by May.
Ethical Arguments
A skill that had been improved during the class and during the case paper writings is the ability to build strong ethical arguments. Ethical arguments were made by using the ethical frameworks and the 4 avenues for analysis of ethical situations learned in class. These tools made the arguments more powerful and more appealing to the classmates. The frameworks were helpful tools to identify the stakeholders impacted by the situations that we studied in class.
Values
The different lectures, discussions in class, articles, and case studies were a special occasion for me to realize that some values and skills are important to be an effective manager.
Empathy and the Ability of Listening to different points of view
This course remembered me the importance of listening. Listening is a great skill that allows us to understand others. Empathy which is the ability to place oneself in others shoes is another great skill for a manager. We always have to learn. It is not only important to learn about the environment in which a manager is living in but also to learn about oneself. We are not perfect, we are humans, humans make mistakes, but by considering a problem under several perspectives and by being able to step back and to listen to others, managers have a deeper overview, helping them to make the right decisions. The conversations in class were a great moment to appreciate everybody’s reflections on the different ethical issues that we studied. It was a constant challenge of the mind to appreciate everybody’s perspectives and arguments. From an initial position on a topic, with my opinions and beliefs, I opened my mind to different approaches of the problems by listening to the discussions made in class.
Humility
Another important element that I took conscience of during the semester is the importance of humility. A humble manager is someone who does not think that he or she is better or more important than others. What a manager learned or has experienced does not make him someone superior to others, he still has to learn from others and others have to learn from him. He should share his knowledge with the persons around him.A society is based on the repartition of the skills of each one so that everybody shares them to build common wealth. I believe that doing business overseas or even at home requires humility because one will get the respect of the persons by showing them that he or she is the not different from others because he/she is human with human beings and has common duties and common values such as the task of being a father or a mother.
Fairness
The Napster case was a great case to study because it made me think on the implication of downloading songs illegally on the internet. It is so easy to click to get a song. And it is so not easy to perceive that downloading illegally hurts people that depend on revenues made by selling songs to create music. The concept of intellectual property is much more abstract than the concept of physical property. Therefore it is not easy to perceive the wrong side of downloading illegally. But as De George claims, artists spend money, time, and energy to create their music. Therefore they should be compensated for their work.
Value of life
Along with the article On Trying Out Ones New Sword by Mary Midgley, the safety first case was an excellent case to develop a reflection on the value of life. I firstly looked at myself and thought how I would place the value of my life, how different are the other lives, and if there was a different value of life for different persons. By looking at myself I looked for my personal values, what I think are my fundamental values and beliefs, those that I would not compromise in any case, in any situation, wherever I am. I think the place of the value of life would be on the top of the list of my beliefs. A life has no price in any situation. If it’s true that people have different places in the society because of their wealth and their social situations, all are humans and nothing distinguish the value of their lives. One could be a billionaire and another one could be a blue collar, what makes them different? They could be both fathers and so both have kids to rise. The children of these two men need their father in both situations. Both men have a social network, family, friends and a community. So a loss of one of the men will impact a lot of persons, which makes a life very important to an even broader perspective.
International Business Ethics
Absolutism vs. Relativism
I learned that by using ethical relativism, morality is relative, that it depends on the situation, so that multiple acceptable standards exist. To the contrary ethical absolutism is a single set of moral, truth, and standards that apply across all situations. In the middle of these two ethical views is ethical universalism. In this case core values such as the Human Rights, are used when doing business overseas.By studying the safety first case I projected myself to the situation of doing business in a country with a totally different culture that I am used to. I then thought to what we learned in class about universalism. I believe that despite the different culture that everybody has, there are still some common values, some fundamental values that should be applied wherever we conduct business. Because we are humans we are confronted to common problems. Being a father/mother for instance represent a good example. A father in the US has the preoccupations of raising his children just as a father in India or in China has the preoccupations to raise his children. So behaviors in whatever country might be guided by some common universal values.Issues such as globalization and cultural differences can appear as a serious challenge when doing business overseas. Perception of imperialism when doing business overseas might be a real concern for an international manager coming from a western country.
Conclusion
To conclude I would say that this course allowed me to realize the importance of ethics. It is not a fancy word used in a company’s mission statement; it is much more than that. Ethics is a part of a company’s policy and culture, and can even be a part of the business strategy. A code of ethics guide employees daily and avoid a climate of uncertainty in a company. It makes sense financially for a company to be guided by ethics rules as stated by Lynn Sharp Paine, “such preventive measures can help companies save millions of dollars in fines, penalties, legal damages, lost productivity, and lost sales – not to mention increase marketing expenditures required to rehabilitate a damaged reputation.”I realized more deeply by analyzing each stakeholders’ avenues, the importance of how a business can influence its local community and also the national and the global community. A company has not only some duties towards those who own it but also toward people working inside the company, towards entities working with the company, towards its customers and toward society in general.To a personal level, since I am 24 years old with few work experience, this course gave me another vision of what a business is. Probably because I am young, when I was thinking to a business prior taking the ethics course, I was principally thinking to the money associated with it. I now have a broader vision of the role of a business and of a manager and their impact in their environment. I believe that each business student should read Charles Handy’s article What’s a business for?, the quote mentioned p.3 to me, is really important and is certainly what impacted me the most on my vision of what a business is this semester.
What is a business for?
During the semester I developed a reflection on what a business is, what it is used for, and what are the implications of doing business. Before class I was seriously thinking of opening a business in order to make money. Now that the semester is over, I realize that a business is not only about money. It is also about people, socialization, and society.
• People inside a company are too often considered as a cost. To the contrary I believe that people inside a company should be considered as one of the greatest assets of the company. It is people that bring ideas, create products, and make the company works.• A company is an important element for the community and to a larger extent for the society in general. A company employs people that are members of the community. Employees have children that are also members of the community. Those members by receiving money from the company (wages) spend for example the money in the shops in town, go to the supermarkets, pay taxes, or make donations. Employees are also active members of the community by participating for instance to events or to associations. So a company contributes to the community through its employees.• A company can also be an active member of the community by acting itself. The company might make donations to the community.
The Dayton Hudson Corporation case is an amazing case that clearly underlined the fact that a business is not only a business it is also a part of a community. A community needs businesses just as businesses needs a community. They belong to each other, they depend to each other. They are linked together financially and by the people.The Enron and Arthur Andersen cases were important cases to see the problems that could arose from a lack of ethics of few people at the top. Personal ambition and financial gain are not what should drive a company. As a result of these scandals, the public opinion distrusted people at the top of the companies. The Enron scandal also revealed the danger of being obsessed by share price which conducts to an inevitable shortening of horizons.I would like to quote Charles Handy who wrote the article What’s a business for?, published in the Harvard Business Review in December 2002, which is very appealing to my conception of a business:“We need to eat to live, food is a necessary condition of life. But if we lived mainly to eat, making food a sufficient or sole purpose of life, we would become gross. The purpose of a business, in other word, is not to make a profit, full stop. It is to make profit so that the business can do something more or better. That “something” becomes the justification for the business. Owners know this. Investors needn’t care.”
Corporate Ethics Policies
By studying the cases of Enron and Arthur Andersen we saw that a lack or an unclear code of ethics can result to wrong behaviors. People inside the company might become confused and lost on the ethical decisions that they have to make. Having such a policy should lead to greater ethical awareness, consistency in application, and avoidance of ethical disasters.
Managers’ duties
This course was also a special occasion for me to think about manager duties. A manager has some duties to the persons working in the different levels of the hierarchy inside the company, to the consumers, to society, and to his profession.• A manager has a duty to well represent his company’s best interests. He should not dishonor the company in which he is working for. He should follow the rules that the company has put in place.• As a member of the company, the manager interacts with persons that are his/her subordinates, his/her peers, and his/her bosses. He has of course a duty to respect these persons. But he also has a duty to be honest and to inform what his actions to the persons working with him are.• A manager is also a member of a profession. Therefore he has some duties to his/her profession. By examining the Enron and Arthur Andersen cases I realized that the persons involved in the scandal not only involved their companies but also their profession. After those scandals the public opinion seriously distrusted the Accounting/Finance professions. Therefore accountants and financial people were starting to feel bad about their jobs. They were not sure anymore about what their jobs should be and what code of ethics to follow.
Realizing a professional oath was an exercise that helped me thinking about my duties and my responsibilities as a manager. Too often rules are imposed to people and they don’t feel concerned by something that they were not a part of. By realizing oneself an oath, it becomes much more important, it does make sense and it is easier to apply in practice. Since it has been realized by oneself it is much more difficult to lie to the commitments made to oneself. This exercise made me realize that if I open my own business in the future I will not force people to apply a code of ethics that I would have decided on my own. Instead I would prefer to empower people to create their own rules in order to make them feel more responsible of their acts. It is morally much harder to break the rules that we make by ourselves to ourselves. As mentions William May, “the society expects professionals to state publicly their own standards of excellence, to conform to those standards individually, and to enforce them upon colleagues within the guild.”Therefore a professional oath made by employees themselves is a great tool to build the standards of excellence mentioned by May.
Ethical Arguments
A skill that had been improved during the class and during the case paper writings is the ability to build strong ethical arguments. Ethical arguments were made by using the ethical frameworks and the 4 avenues for analysis of ethical situations learned in class. These tools made the arguments more powerful and more appealing to the classmates. The frameworks were helpful tools to identify the stakeholders impacted by the situations that we studied in class.
Values
The different lectures, discussions in class, articles, and case studies were a special occasion for me to realize that some values and skills are important to be an effective manager.
Empathy and the Ability of Listening to different points of view
This course remembered me the importance of listening. Listening is a great skill that allows us to understand others. Empathy which is the ability to place oneself in others shoes is another great skill for a manager. We always have to learn. It is not only important to learn about the environment in which a manager is living in but also to learn about oneself. We are not perfect, we are humans, humans make mistakes, but by considering a problem under several perspectives and by being able to step back and to listen to others, managers have a deeper overview, helping them to make the right decisions. The conversations in class were a great moment to appreciate everybody’s reflections on the different ethical issues that we studied. It was a constant challenge of the mind to appreciate everybody’s perspectives and arguments. From an initial position on a topic, with my opinions and beliefs, I opened my mind to different approaches of the problems by listening to the discussions made in class.
Humility
Another important element that I took conscience of during the semester is the importance of humility. A humble manager is someone who does not think that he or she is better or more important than others. What a manager learned or has experienced does not make him someone superior to others, he still has to learn from others and others have to learn from him. He should share his knowledge with the persons around him.A society is based on the repartition of the skills of each one so that everybody shares them to build common wealth. I believe that doing business overseas or even at home requires humility because one will get the respect of the persons by showing them that he or she is the not different from others because he/she is human with human beings and has common duties and common values such as the task of being a father or a mother.
Fairness
The Napster case was a great case to study because it made me think on the implication of downloading songs illegally on the internet. It is so easy to click to get a song. And it is so not easy to perceive that downloading illegally hurts people that depend on revenues made by selling songs to create music. The concept of intellectual property is much more abstract than the concept of physical property. Therefore it is not easy to perceive the wrong side of downloading illegally. But as De George claims, artists spend money, time, and energy to create their music. Therefore they should be compensated for their work.
Value of life
Along with the article On Trying Out Ones New Sword by Mary Midgley, the safety first case was an excellent case to develop a reflection on the value of life. I firstly looked at myself and thought how I would place the value of my life, how different are the other lives, and if there was a different value of life for different persons. By looking at myself I looked for my personal values, what I think are my fundamental values and beliefs, those that I would not compromise in any case, in any situation, wherever I am. I think the place of the value of life would be on the top of the list of my beliefs. A life has no price in any situation. If it’s true that people have different places in the society because of their wealth and their social situations, all are humans and nothing distinguish the value of their lives. One could be a billionaire and another one could be a blue collar, what makes them different? They could be both fathers and so both have kids to rise. The children of these two men need their father in both situations. Both men have a social network, family, friends and a community. So a loss of one of the men will impact a lot of persons, which makes a life very important to an even broader perspective.
International Business Ethics
Absolutism vs. Relativism
I learned that by using ethical relativism, morality is relative, that it depends on the situation, so that multiple acceptable standards exist. To the contrary ethical absolutism is a single set of moral, truth, and standards that apply across all situations. In the middle of these two ethical views is ethical universalism. In this case core values such as the Human Rights, are used when doing business overseas.By studying the safety first case I projected myself to the situation of doing business in a country with a totally different culture that I am used to. I then thought to what we learned in class about universalism. I believe that despite the different culture that everybody has, there are still some common values, some fundamental values that should be applied wherever we conduct business. Because we are humans we are confronted to common problems. Being a father/mother for instance represent a good example. A father in the US has the preoccupations of raising his children just as a father in India or in China has the preoccupations to raise his children. So behaviors in whatever country might be guided by some common universal values.Issues such as globalization and cultural differences can appear as a serious challenge when doing business overseas. Perception of imperialism when doing business overseas might be a real concern for an international manager coming from a western country.
Conclusion
To conclude I would say that this course allowed me to realize the importance of ethics. It is not a fancy word used in a company’s mission statement; it is much more than that. Ethics is a part of a company’s policy and culture, and can even be a part of the business strategy. A code of ethics guide employees daily and avoid a climate of uncertainty in a company. It makes sense financially for a company to be guided by ethics rules as stated by Lynn Sharp Paine, “such preventive measures can help companies save millions of dollars in fines, penalties, legal damages, lost productivity, and lost sales – not to mention increase marketing expenditures required to rehabilitate a damaged reputation.”I realized more deeply by analyzing each stakeholders’ avenues, the importance of how a business can influence its local community and also the national and the global community. A company has not only some duties towards those who own it but also toward people working inside the company, towards entities working with the company, towards its customers and toward society in general.To a personal level, since I am 24 years old with few work experience, this course gave me another vision of what a business is. Probably because I am young, when I was thinking to a business prior taking the ethics course, I was principally thinking to the money associated with it. I now have a broader vision of the role of a business and of a manager and their impact in their environment. I believe that each business student should read Charles Handy’s article What’s a business for?, the quote mentioned p.3 to me, is really important and is certainly what impacted me the most on my vision of what a business is this semester.
