Martha Kostyra Of Nutley New Jersey
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In order to answer the Stewart’s strategy from ethic perspective, we have to look not only at her personality and characteristic of ethics but also the characteristic of her business and the society ethics that her business depending on. I believe she needs to recognize the utilitarian ethics and incorporate part of it to both her personal life and her business.
First of all, her personality was the key element of explaining why her attitude towards the issues. In here, I will first discuss different characteristics of ethics from different worldview. There are four different types of ethics if the world is divided into four different types of personalities which have been adapted from four different four different instrumental worldviews developed by Dr. Mark N. Wexler. Regulatory worldview is like lawyer type of personality. There are all kinds social rules that person should follow. They believe to serve duty is the most important. The duties can be assigned by either others or by themselves. Being ethic to them is to be careful research, thorough information analysis and making decisions based on creditable records or proves. On another side, the network worldview is the people who have strong believe in innovation. They carry exploratory ethics which give recognition of taking risks without knowing the outcome. This heavily influenced by the type of the work of an innovator does who would try lots of new things that have never been done before in order to innovate. It is the opposite of the regulatory point view. However, both instrumental worldviews do not apply to Martha Stewart and her business. As an individual Martha Stewart belongs more to the entrepreneurial worldview. I believe she is a very entrepreneurial type of person. As one author commented, “To the degree that her business partners were prepared to help advance the success of Martha Stewart, she was willing to roll right over them.” Some others think she is a juggler. As a very successful female business person, there are lots of disputes around her. This is typical for entrepreneurs. From these two comments made by others, I can see she was not quite flexible around people, but she was rather willing to take more control, because if someone has different opinions from her, she will more likely to turn them down. This typically can be seen from her bought back the brand rights from Time Warner with everything she got, when Time Warner has different opinion amount the business issues. This also shows her strong risk taking personality. Nobody can guarantee her that business plan would success, but she took it as an opportunity. This was much more like an innovator in responding to the competition. She stood up for competition. I believe she deserve part of fortune her made in that sense (important). However, some fortune that her business organization carries was from the society. Her reputation in leading the way of home and living in American society provide that piece of fortune. However, it was the society that provided good will to her of the admirer. This leads us to that her company as an organization was in the center of the community which shares a communitarian worldview. At least it should. This means the American society has already chose her to be the leader in the home and living community. She represents the icon of what American believe the right way of setting home and the way of living. She and her company was the chosen one. It proved by so many awards she got and top advertising rates that MSLO got. She and the company automatically carry the utilitarian ethics. Whether ethical or not really depends on the overall contribution to the society which judged by the society. However, Martha Stewart, herself, was a very entrepreneurial who believes her success was based on her hard working and took the right opportunity. The failure of recognize there are still part of the fortune given by the society, and society has to full rights and power to take away from her if she failed to represent them anymore. The scandal won’t kill a great leader completely, but fail of continuing stay on the pass of representing the majorities of the community will ultimately diminish and kill the leadership.
As an entrepreneur she has different notion of consciousness than communitarian. From the scandal we can see that she doesn’t have very strong consciousness of social contract. As in American society, people commonly agree insider trading is a hundred percent unethical. (Inside trading in here means illegal insider trading. There are legal insider trading, but it was not the case in here) There is no dealt about it in American society. It might be ok for other society. It might be part of her personality which prefers takes the chance. However, despite whether she really did inside trade or just an honest mistake, she shouldn’t do so. As any rational person one wouldn’t take the action. However, this only leads me to believe that she failed to recognize that either her action was strongly against by the society or the magnitude of the consequences that would impact on her image of being a leader in America. I believe she misses the characteristic of the communitarian. If she thinks the society more than herself, she wouldn’t to do so. If she realizes how much society has pin hope on her, she wouldn’t to do so. If she understands how much society could take back from her, show wouldn’t to do so. She should learn more about the society she was doing business in, which will ultimately give her the power of being success.
However, it is very hard to be both entrepreneurial person and communitarian person, because entrepreneur wants to be differentiated from others and communitarian wants to be same as all the others. To solve this problem, she needs to recognize the benefit of a company would bring to her in the sense of a separate entity. However, in her case it was quite hard to separate between her and the company, because she was the founder and much of her reputation has brought into the organization. Especially, at now days in the post-modern society, it is harder and harder to separate private life and professional life. Even if she didn’t have scandal in financial activities, it is still easy for public find out other unethical behaviours that she could potentially do. Therefore, she needs to decide choose one side or another. She could choose still being as an ideal of the America and lead the company in the media sector, but she would suffer losing her entrepreneurial personality if she could do so, which I don’t believe anyone can do so after age of 20. Or she could hire someone is more communitarian type person who could represent American’s way of living, and her reputation of being the model of living will die out. But the