Does Anyone Care for Business Ethics?

As the businesses become globalize, the competition intensifies at the same time. Mergers and acquisitions become in common in order to capture the market share. The size of a company becomes matter. The pressure to increase bottom line from the shareholders and the environmental changes are rapidly affecting day-to-day corporate business decisions. Yet, investors rely on companies' business ethics and honest marketplace.

Since the Enron, Tyco, and Tenet Corporations have become a fraudulent symbol of American corporations, many companies business conducts have been in question and forced to make significant changes in their business practices.

Some companies built their businesses under 'doing a right thing' and lived by their ethical principles. Now a day, 'doing a right thing' is not an option, it is a must. However, it is a challenge and requires discipline thinking and courage particularly in the business world. It must apply ethical policies from the executives to the bottom of the command in a firm in order to believe and practice it as a whole.

In recent years, we have seen the consequence of fraudulent conducts by the greed executives: Hundreds of people lost their pensions, jobs, savings, and retirements. Meanwhile, the Fed caught their tails while they were fattening their own pockets with money. We cheered with deep sigh when Enron CEO Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were found guilty and both men face the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison. But, there is no sign of recovering of $70 billion and 4,500 job losses.

A long time ago, one's greed was considered as its ambition and many people believed that it was a good thing as long as it didn't hurt anyone. Many people accepted building a personal wealth with hard work and honesty with praise. Even companies ran their businesses within the ethical boundaries and the employees and the company reached an agreement without written policies.

The question about business ethics however, has raised long before Enron, Tyco, and Tenet Corporations. Smaller companies have also played games with securities in the past, and some will certainly do so in the future. Despite these crooked corporations on the news, there are many companies take business ethics very seriously and operate businesses under code of conduct.

If an individual doesn't have honesty, integrity, and character to own or run a company, the company probably doesn't have a written code of conduct nor care to do the right thing. Deceptive accounting is more often a consequence of financial crisis than the cause. In Enron's case however, an individual greed is more likely the cause. The market caught onto them before federal regulators did. Our free market is dependent upon trust and accountability. Confidence in marketplace is paramount to open market. Free market economy relies on business ethics of both publicly traded companies and small enterprises.

Business ethics are based on individual's business conduct. Each individual does a right thing and care for another will make a difference in the world of business and society. Enron is an epitome of fraudulent corporations and taught us the consequences of the corporate greed and unethical business practices, which caused grief to thousands of employees and investors.

Honesty, integrity, and quality are the three ingredients for the business success as well as the best quality an individual to possess. Creating the kind of company that stands for something more than the bottom line, and its bottom line will increase. Corporations’ accountability and trust worthy get their investors’ confidence and win the global competition in the long run.

Business ethics should not be just a written policy it has to be imbedded in us to practice it, believe in it, and live in it. Our free and open market is dependent on it and global economy relies on it.