Can business ever be ethical?

Can business ever be ethical?  This question is posed to me more often than any other and that’s because people are truly cynical about ethical business practice and the profit motive.  The premise here is that when profit is involved ethical business practice goes out the window.  I must admit to understanding such a point of view, particularly when you consider the dire straits the financial sector and economies around the world now find themselves in.  This crisis has nothing to do with criminality though and  everything to do with morality in the marketplace, or lack thereof.  That’s why I don’t buy the idea that ethical business practice and the profit motive are mutually exclusive.  Now that may not be a popular point of view in some quarters but some of the best advances in the history of human kind started with someone being persecuted for what the majority thought was a stupid idea.

Imagine what Moses must have encountered when he spoke of leading the Jewish nation into the land of Israel? Imagine the first person to say slavery was wrong? How about segregation, a united Europe, global warming, the end of Apartheid, Israel and Palestine in peaceful co existence? But also imagine what it must have been like for the first doctor to say he suspected there was something – invisible to the human eye – that made people get sick? He was talking about bacteria. Or that one day it would be possible to see through skin and muscle to look at a bone in something called an X-ray. Space travel? Walking on the moon? International space station? Or what about an Olympic games for disabled people? Imagine a business world where businesses have corporate social responsibility programmes? Pay for staff to educate themselves? Where a women would be paid at the same rate as a man? Or that a black woman could be the CEO of a company? Ethical business practice may or may not be something that business is ever capable of. But for now it makes me feel better about the world that it is a distinct possibility ……. look how much we have already achieved.  Leadership is inspiring.  Be inspired.