Battlelines Unclear In Debate On Ethics
The Age
Saturday September 25, 1999
What makes a deal fair and ethical? Does it matter that businesses operate morally?
A cynic might say that the boom in business ethics is good for business in more ways than one. The more it is taught in business schools, the more textbooks and specialist journals there are on the subject, the more baffling it is for managers and executives.
Not that they don't know how be ethical. It's just that they need someone to shed light on those murky areas that Harvard Business School lecturer Joseph L. Badaracco once described as ``not issues of right versus wrong" but ``conflicts of right versus right".
That might explain why nearly 200 people turned up on Thursday night for the final seminar of Archbishop George Pell's ethics-in-business series.
All this in a week when Esso learned it faced more than $9million in fines after Victoria's WorkCover Authority charged the oil giant with 45 offences arising from last year's explosion at the Longford gas plant, when a Government's fate hung in the balance after questions of accountability and cosy deals with business were used as ammunition in an election campaign, and when the United States Justice Department launched a multi billion-dollar lawsuit, filed under US racketeering laws, against the tobacco industry.
Unfortunately, the symposium was disappointing and failed to address these and other issues.
Plenty of talk about right versus wrong, little about right versus right. Certainly no answers to questions such as: To whom do you owe your loyalty? How do you resolve conflicts of interest? Are you confident the decision will be equally as valid five years from now? Could the problem be resolved in another way? The list goes on.
Sharing the floor with Dr Pell and the Office of the Status of Women's Ms Pru Goward, business leader Mr John Ralph explained that ethics were important because they were good for business. Companies, he said, ignored this at their own peril.
So what happens when there is a clash between your own interests and being ethical, when there is conflict between being right and the bottom line, between morality and shareholder value?
The answer, he suggested, was to think long term.
Trouble is, the long view is not a strong point for Australian business. And, as the John Laws affair demonstrated, some wouldn't know a mixed motive if they fell over one.
© 1999 The Age