There are two reasons that I am writing about business and ethics again today.
Reason #1: At the end of May, I began receiving emails from Strong Financial, my former investment company that became my former investment company after it’s founder and captain, Dick Strong was caught using time zones and different closing times of international markets to pad his own personal stake in the company. These emails were talking about how exciting it was for Strong Financial customers that Strong Financial was going to be “merged” into Wells Fargo, thus resulting in access to new Wells Fargo investments. I must admit that I had a very difficult time getting excited about this because I knew that the only reason these Wells Fargo investments were being made available to me was because Dick Strong acted in an unethical manner, was caught, forced out of his leadership positions, resulting in the fail of Strong Financial and the necessity for it to be picked up by Wells Fargo in order to survive. Could you imagine spending your life building a company, then losing it just because you got a little greedy? This time-zone play was wrong and Dick Strong knew that it was wrong, and now his life’s work is going to end up as part of a division of Wells Fargo.
Reason #2: Teresa was at traffic school this past Saturday and re-told to me a story that the class’s instructor told her. When this instructor was a young girl, her family was involved in a car accident while on a road trip. The evening of the accident, the instructor and her sister found themselves in a strange town with nowhere to stay the night while their parents were in the hospital being treated for their injuries. The instructor’s mother called for a priest and the priest found a family for the girls to spend the night with that lived in the same town that the hospital was in. As the instructor was telling the story to Teresa’s traffic school class, she commented on how things were different back then and how people could be trusted.
We all know that things were different back then, but then this led me to ponder the question of why we have accepted this decline in ethics over time.
There is no question that, on the whole, American society grows more and more unethical every year. American business can do little but follow that trend because American business is made up of the same individuals that make up American society.
Ethics do not decline overnight, so there is not a clear-cut morning where we wake up and things are suddenly unethical, but even though this slide of ethics has occurred over decades, I cannot help but ponder why there are so many people out there in the business world that tolerate loose ethics, or a lack of ethics altogether, from the people they do business with and the people that they employ.
Why does an 18 year-old kid in the work place today think it is perfectly all right to sit in the company bathroom and text message his friends while on the clock? Is it technology’s fault? Is it how children are raised now as opposed to then?
It may be part of the reason, but what I am coming to believe is that the largest portion of blame for this slide in ethics lies with people out there in the business world who tolerate it.
Ethics thrive when unethical behavior is not tolerated, therefore, naturally, ethics decline when unethical behavior is tolerated. The text messaging kid’s managers know what he is doing, but they continue to let it happen. If the company’s owner knew what the kid was doing, he would be gone, but why do the managers tolerate this unethical behavior? Their tolerance of it not only allows his unethical behavior to continue, but contributes to the rise of unethical behavior from others at the company as well.
So, what can we as business owners and professionals do to ensure that ethics stop declining? Never tolerate unethical behavior from those we do business with and those that work for us.
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