What Is Business EthicsAnd Why Is it More Important Now Than Ever? Business ethics addresses the two fundamentally floored issues behind our current business model. (1) The demand for an almost exclusive focus on profitability and increased share holder value and (2) A desire for ever more growth. In the current global financial upheaval, the questions posed in exploring business ethics are increasingly urgent. At core, we need to examine the truth/non-truth being told by leadership. Are the messages delivered an accurate depiction of the situation?
Is our fundamental model built of ever increasing growth and increased share holder value be part of the problem? What is the purpose of business? Of our particular business? What is our business philosophy? What are our rights and responsibilities? How do we manage conflict, cross cultural communication and corporate social responsibility? What is ethical marketing? Ethical sales? And how do we create ethics in the workplace, even in a world that rejects an ethical stand?
From the place of the individual within a business, and their own ethics; from the place of the dynamic that occurs when a group get together and ethics is more easily eroded by peer pressure and various other group think responses; from the place of the systems and structures that support the fine tuning, maintaining and evolution of ethics in business; and from the ways the business presents itself to world, through aligned and congruent action and behaviors. We also will explore how organizations operating at different stages of development require different ethical structures to maintain their ethics, and how little atrocities -seemingly small isolated little transgressions - are ignored for their smallness, however, accumulate and become ever larger, seemingly inadvertently, until they become significant ethical breakdowns, perpetrated by essentially good people who became incrementally bad. Witness many of our recent situations, such as Enron, and our current financial collapse, where within weeks of the $700 billion bail out, Wall Street bankers approved $20 billion in bonus payments. (In other words, tax payer money bails out the banks, so they can use part of this to pay bonus's when their own performance has been shocking, while the very same tax payers loose their homes. How do the bankers sleep at night?) Like all of our Integral modeling, we go from the micro (self) to the macro, and back again. Positive Deviants and PD organizations place a very high focus on business ethics. Let us plunge into the world of business ethics together.
Ethics in the Workplace using an Integral Perspective
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