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bjbjq Greg, tell us why the area of business ethics is so fascinating. Well, I ve found
ethics fascinating since the late 1980s when I worked both internationally and nationally
with a major resource company. It took me overseas where I came across different cultures,
and the way that they perceived doing business was slightly different from the way that I
perceived doing business. There were things that occurred that did challenge you. And
when I came back to Australia I was confronted by the economic downturn, and that put all
of the knowledge that I had overseas into some perspective. Australia itself had been
through its own ethics situation and was then going to be examining why we were in the situation
that we were in financially in the late 1980s and with the crash of the market. That was
something that needed to be addressed. There have been a lot of lessons learned recently
through stories from the GFC. How much does ethics affect an organisation's long-term
performance? It has a major effect on long-term performance one example being BRW which in
May 1997 ran a supplement on Where are they now? , looking at the top 25 business people
of May 1987 when the crash hit Australia. And it found that three out of the top five
had served time in Her Majesty s Prison within that 10-year period. So, subsequently, the
situation is that, in terms of the reputation of organisations and the outcomes we see with
Enron and companies like Arthur Andersen, and we now see with the GFC and Lehman Brothers,
they no longer exist. And they no longer exist because they were confused in the way they
did business. So they not only got confused with their ethical compass, but their moral
and legal compass too. You have conducted extensive research on ethics standards in
different parts of the world. Can you tell us a little bit more about that research?
That research has been going on in Australia since 1995 and it now being done in the United
States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Taiwan and Turkey, with my research
partners at various universities. What it looks at is the top 500 companies in the private
sector and their codes of ethics and how they actually inculcate the ethos of their code
of ethics into their everyday activity such as: Do they have education committees? Do
they have ombudsmen? Do they have whistleblower protection in place? How do they take what
they are trying to achieve with their staff? What are they trying to achieve from a strategic
point of view, and how do they make that ethics point of view flow through the organisation?
What I have found is it s different in different parts of the world. The United States and
Canada are much more legalistic coming from a North America perspective. In Sweden, it
s not quite as legalistic because in Sweden up until the early 2000s, when they had some
scandals of their own, they believed that, being Swedish, they did the right thing anyway.
The interesting part is in all of the research I have done the Americans tend to be very,
very strong on having in place many of the artefacts, and the one area they are lacking,
compared to other countries, is they don t compare their code of ethics with their strategic
plan. Now, if you don t compare your code of ethics with your strategic plan, you then
leave yourself open to the fact that people may perpetrate actions on your behalf that
don t fit with your ethical code and that to me may well be the Achilles heel of the
reason why we have these types of crisis. Companies don t make that comparison back
to their strategic plan in respect to what they are asking their staff to do in the market
place. Now Greg, is the world becoming a more ethical place? We would hope it is, and legislation
has been put in place to make us more aware. The only concern that I have in respect to
us becoming more ethical is that the business system by which we work is predicated on the
fact that we must always have continual growth. If you don t have continual growth or even
if you stay still, then media commentators will look at your organisation and suggest
that you may be actually going backwards not forwards. The dilemma with that is it then
affects your share price, it then affects the way you are perceived by the market and
sometimes it puts people in invidious positions where they will do things they wouldn t have
normally done and in actual fact, place themselves in a position perhaps outside of the law.
It s interesting some of the research shows that if you look at people with ethical dilemmas
and you give them the same scenarios of work that you would at home, most people would
do things at work that they have never considered doing in their home and yet the ethical nature
of the dilemma is exactly the same. So, it is a concern. I hope we are getting more ethical.
We are definitely being more legislated, but I still think there s that inherent human
weakness, that greed is good, which sometimes still comes to a fall. So can ethics be taught
in a corporate education workshop? m not sure that ethics can be taught in any situation.
I tend to believe that we come to any ethics workshop, any ethics class, any ethics instruction
and any ethics education with a pre determined set of values and experiences. I can t teach
people to be ethical, but what I can do is provide them with the frameworks, experiences
and opportunities to question their own ethical views and that of their society so that they
can move forward and hopefully learn from that experience. hiX` ph333 ph333 ph333 phZZZ
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