Running a business involves number of factors outside the scope of making money, of which ethics is definitely one. As your business grows you impact on the lives and circumstances of people through bringing jobs, creating wealth and inspiring others to grow their businesses. An important part of engaging in this process is for understanding your business ethics, which if not up to scratch can leave you with a bad reputation and can even ruin your business, not to mention alienating employees, suppliers and the local community.
Ethics is something of a subjective topic, but is of immense importance. From the way in which sales and marketing is handled through to product development and customer service, and even to some extent finance, ethics has a significant role to play in ensuring business success and ultimately living up to the corporate social responsibility. Thus adopting a ethics-specific approach to doing business is critical towards ensuring a legitimate business model with long term potential.
Therefore, study of business ethics is vital; because an educated person not educated in ethics is a menace to society.
William Giabbai has the right idea. If I say “red” how do you know what shade of red I am talking about? Ethics is all about helping you understand the expectations of others. Sometimes this is a legal concept (i.e. engineering has a code of ethics to which you are required to adhere to) while other times it simply suggest a set of behavioral patterns.
Regardless, most of it could be considered common sense. Yet, as my “red” example pointed out, sometimes what you think is the proper definition or expectation may not be the same as what others think.
I believe that you understand that business ethics is important but you can’t understand why you have to study it because ethics is something that comes with you and not something that can be learned. If so, you’re right. The problem is not everyone has the same concept of ethics. So, what you have to learn is how to implement business ethics in a way that people do things not because someone told them to but because they “feel” they have to do them.
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