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All the big business collapses over the last few years have exposed the lack of moral code & ethics in a lot of corporations, not to mention very unsatisfactory business models. It appears that business needs a core of ethics & integrity to thrive and enjoy long term success. Ethics are not optional because we work & live with other human beans! TechCrunch recently had a great post by Vivek Wadhwa titled Integrating Ethics Into The Core Of Your Startups: Why And How which raised the issue of integrity & authenticity in business. He identifies a few issues:
Create a culture of openness and welcome dissentLead by exampleLearn from immediate peers or distant modelsRecognize your own fallibility as a leader, know your limits, and beware of the myth of immortalityRemember that institutional character — like a liquid cupped in your hand — is fragile; easily lost; and hard, if not impossible, to regainEstablish an independent board
I’m proud to say that most early-stage VCs that I know really do care about making money ethically. So consider integrity on my personal list of attributes required to raise money from a reputable, early-stage VC. I know that many media outlets would like to portray this in a different way but knowing many of these individuals I believe it is true for most. When companies start to make huge sums of money it’s always easy for the media to question the integrity of the company.
Professor David Batstone offers ten Principles for entrepreneurial ethics:
Company directors and management will consider their work force valuable team members, not merely hired labor
A company will think of itself as a part of a community, not just a “market”
A company will take every possible care to ensure the quality and safety of the products it brings to the public
A company will treat the environment as a silent “stakeholder,” a party to which it is wholly accountable
A company will strive to diversify the kind of people who lead and manage its affairs
A company will pursue international trade and production based on reciprocal exchanges that respect the same rights accorded its own people
A company will nurture an organizational culture that encourages its employees to give critical feedback on unethical practices, and even “blow the whistle” when their voices are ignored
A company will protect the privacy rights of its suppliers, customers, and employees
A company will deliver what it promises, and promise what it can deliver
A company will not seek to generate any revenue from practices that threaten life
I feel really good about these defined ethics in business and try to live by them every day. When we view our business from the bigger picture it is obvious that these are really helpful building blocks that guide us through the activity & busyness of day to day work. To wind up I would just like to highlight a rather unethical company on the net Mahalo run by Jason Calcanis. Aaron Wall from SEOBook has written a number of posts exposing this company’s habit of scraping content off the net and using it as their search results with no attribution to the original author or website. He states:
Of course people don’t have to cut corners, lie, cheat, and steal to build a real business. Those are the strategies employed by people trying to sell value where none exists. You can do just fine by dominating a small niche THEN leveraging data to grow. It is not sexy. You probably can’t hype to the media. It might not lead to an 8 or 9 figure payday. But then you won’t have to describe your strategy as “whatever tactics, however evil.”
What base do you stand on in the business world? Is it solid like the ethical framework mentioned above or a more flexible stand that adjusts each moment responding to immediate opportunities for profit.
