By Andy Carling
With the almost daily reports of wrongdoing by business or governments, New Europe discussed how to move forward with Prof. Charles Sampford, Director of Australia’s Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law.
reputational compliance
Business and ethics has been the underlying theme in major news stories for the last few years, how close is ethics to business?
Ethics can’t have a separate word. Either you act ethically or not. Ethics is not sat on some surreal cloud. Ethics is about people doing everyday jobs and thinking about their values, asking hard questions about those values and living by them. If you do, you have integrity and act ethically. If you don’t, the first person you cheat is yourself, because you’re not the person you told yourself you are.
You also cheat other, but that’s secondary. This is individual ethics and one of the problems of talking about public ethics, or business ethics is that it concerns how an organization works, not just an individual. It’s not the matter of an unethical corporation and an ethical saint trying to do the right thing. What we need is for business ethics to go through the same process as an individual. It needs to ask hard questions, give honest and public answers and live by it.
This article was written by Andy Carling and originally published on neurope
