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There are no workable one-minute manager approaches for business ethics.
Competition is too intense. Strategic variables are too complex. And the expectations of investors, regulators and stakeholders are too demanding. Already under pressure to deliver superb business results, managers now face a growing burden to operate with care for social and environmental responsibilities. So serious a task has no shortcuts but instead requires thoughtful deliberation.
Hence the invitation: to “have a seat” - to take a pause, and explore some of the topics that help penetrate the often-foggy reality of business ethics.
The goals for the CEO Journal are threefold:
Reading the signs of the times, there are four pressures at work that are undoing the viability for "business as usual".
Business ethics have already become a priority for many companies around the world. Scandals have made apparent the need for more robust systems for managerial responsibility. While new laws and codes are a start, there are foundational pressures unfolding that require a more far-reaching transformation. These include:
Environmental Exhaustion:
Numerous studies have confirmed that we are fast exhausting the economic viability of our natural ecosystem while accelerating potentially devastating climate change and species extinction. Aggressive responsibility to sustainability must be accepted as central to every company mission, every strategic plan, and every personal job-description.
Incomplete Globalization:
Globalization pulls companies to pursue extremes of efficiency while at the same time pushing them to the farthest limits of competitiveness. In the vice-grip of such pressures, managers tend to lose both long-term perspective and the flexibility for moral discretion.
Technological Dislocation:
New technology poses opportunities within a double-dilemma. The opportunities are the obvious ones unique to each industry of advancement through innovation. The dilemmas are mostly neglected.
- The first is that much of the connectivity and information processing that has enabled globalization is also imposing much greater transparency and accountability on all organizations.
- The second is that many of the new spheres of business innovation, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and genetic engineering, pose ever more complex ethical and moral quandaries.
Just as companies needed wholesale renewal to address quality in the 1980s and productivity in the 1990s, they will need to focus systematically on moral excellence in the decade ahead.
Productivity Paradox:
Facing unrelenting pressure for performance, people in business rarely have the time to invest serious thought in what they do and why they do it. If considered at all, ethical impacts are given short shrift, usually as a filter for testing decisions made against priorities of short-term pragmatism. This reductive approach to business ethics has ironically diminished the value of the individual person within organizations at the very time that companies and institutions require greater integrity and moral leadership.
Fostering a systematic approach to business ethics requires that we get beyond the easy caricatures that paint all business people as sinister, while at the same time recognizing that current managerial practices are inadequate for the moral tests we now face.
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