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Indeed a company's "morals" are better exposed when it has to make inconvenient choices.
by curt15 7y ago
Indeed a company's "morals" are better exposed when it has to make inconvenient choices.
- wwright 7y agoI would say true morals lead to structuring your company in such a way that you don’t have to rely on business people making ethical decisions moment to moment, because they won’t.
- duncanawoods 7y agoAs nice as that sounds, I think it requires an impossibly perfect prediction of future events. You face ethical decisions whenever you have power or limited resources.
- wwright 7y agoYeah, I agree, but I think that is just a way of stating that morals are impossible to perfect.
- duncanawoods 7y agoHmm maybe - what I have in mind is that you could run something undeniably good e.g. a hospital, and you will still face hard ethical decisions about how you handle uncertainty, apply power or allocate your resources. Doing good things just isn’t easy!
- erikpukinskis 7y agoNo. You can bend your business model towards transactions you are comfortable with, without perfect future vision, or even a clear strategic understanding of how that might happen. In fact, the world around you will bend to meet your values whether you’re even aware of it. And that includes any companies you run. The world does extend beyond your knowledge of it.
- Retric 7y agoThe same forces that require several levels of management make it increasingly difficult to enforce ethical decisions. Basically, when no one person can keep track of all the moving pieces you get splits around what individuals think is acceptable behavior. The larger organizations grows the more things tend to diverge, with different branches often having wildly different perspectives. This tends to further degrade as new employees are added and any whatever original vision was going on continues to degrade over time. Especially as both the times and even business models change.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoYes, and all of those are decisions you can go along with or reject. Deciding how big an organization you will join is one of many ways you apply your ethics.
- Retric 7y agoThat’s another issue. As an organization is viewed as less ethical, only less ethical people join creating a downward spiral.
- chongli 7y agoHopefully the unethical organization develops a reputation for being unethical. Then only unethical people will patronize said organization. Ideally, unethical behaviour leads to marginalization, though obviously that does not always happen in practice.
- simonh 7y agoSamsung are a strong counter-example. They're been caught red handed doing all sorts of truly nasty stuff. Pretty much anything Apple has even been suggested as doing, they've been enthusiastically up to their eyeballs in and a lot more, but they seem to just shrug off the negative press like water off a duck's back. I think once a company develops a reputation like that, most people just get desensitised to it. Also there is a degree to which lower cost products get a pass, because hey, they must be cutting corners somewhere.
- lmm 7y agoYou can certainly form a company whose line of business minimizes how many ethical questions it will face; I'd consider that to be ducking out and ultimately less moral than entering a business where there are genuinely tough ethical questions that you will need to take positions on (and inevitably sometimes get wrong).
- philwelch 7y agoHow is that even possible?
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y agoFor example between easily upgradeable environment-friendly product and a box of glued components with no-user replaceable parts so that they need to buy a new item in the line sooner.