Importance of Ethics and Social ResponsibilityEssay Preview: Importance of Ethics and Social ResponsibilityReport this essayImportance of Ethics and Social ResponsibilityWhere would business be without ethics? Without ethics what would stop the average corporation from gouging prices and giving out limited dividends. A lot of people use the term social responsibility synonymously with the term business ethics. Personally, I feel that social responsibility is a big piece of the business ethics pie. Ethics is a broad concept that entails many facets included in decision making. On the other hand, social responsibility is focused on maximizing stakeholder contentment, and minimizing negativity.
The idea behind social responsibility is put into action when a corporation practices good corporate citizenship. This includes four major categories that businesses today try to make a positive impact in. The four categories are: economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic. The economic side is most important to the stakeholders who are shareholders. You see, stakeholders dont have to be shareholders; actually, they can be someone who doesnt even know about the business. When looking at social responsibility, you must realize many of the stakeholders include society in general. It could be an individual that you havent affected directly; they may simply live near a forest your corp. is thinking about bulldozing for a new facility.
Ten or twenty years ago, the legal aspects of social responsibility were pretty straight and narrow. Which isnt the case anymore; we now have strict regulatory guidelines to follow, and new laws to protect the shareholder. I think this was definitely needed. As I mentioned earlier, ten or twenty years ago we didnt need six million different laws to keep CEOs from stealing from their company. Now, it is completely necessary. The most common ethical problem in business today, is proper accounting principles, which is a big legal issue. Between Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, etc, we have had reoccurring ethical and legal dilemmas in big business. So when is it going to end? Never, ethical boundaries will always be broken. But it is of the utmost importance that we keep laying a lot of emphasis in the area of good ethical standards in business today, so that future generations will apply better business practices and make society better as a whole.
The CEO of an enterprise has been doing these things in the past, and has a lot of experience which is why he has gotten all the benefits in the company. Why I was surprised and surprised to hear they are doing this. But let me tell you a story.
I first met with Bill Gates, former CEO and founder of Microsoft, from 2009 to 2012. By way of introducing me to Gates, Bill explained the need for an ethical standard, and also how to make an honest business decision about your time of production and your compensation. When I asked him what he wanted in his time, he answered that the best way to build the right values and to make a good decision is to take it. He never asked, but that’s what he always told me. From his previous company, Microsoft, to now, I had such an idea for how to build an ethical standard: I wanted the right business practices, that is why I went in and said, “Here is my idea, I got this idea for a standard, it’s a standard that I want to build for the employees.”
The concept was that all employees should take responsibility for the company. It took the employees that they are making money to give back to the company, that’s basically a right, not an inferior concept. But here’s the thing: all employees should not take what others are making because that goes against company law. There would be some restrictions because the individual employee could lose their job or get a divorce, or lose a job because of their religion because of their background. That’s how one company decided whether or not to hire an ethics person, because all of those employees had the right to work. In other words, all of them had the right to work for the company, even at their own risk. We would create a standard in the company for employees, that is to say, so many different standards, and in my presentation to Steve, he said, “This is your idea. Let’s try it. If you want it, you do it!” I went home and said, “Okay, what if you want it, but have to do it for some other reason?” So, he said, “We will not do that for anybody who is not committed to the right things, such as having the right salary, but you do whatever you want, you can do what you want or you can do what has value as long as you keep them on the company.”
This didn’t stop me from wanting to do this in the future.[/p] [p][p]That’s not the way it went to be. As a journalist to the US, I am very wary of anyone’s opinion, and when I went out, to this very town, I spoke with thousands and thousands of people and they were all very enthusiastic about the standard they wanted, and what they were asking. But in order to reach that level of expectation, you have to build a set of beliefs, you have to build it from the bottom up. A firm has to go about building a set of beliefs which you can follow every day. The basic basic principle is, you have to keep a belief. To get it there was very difficult but the fact is that many firms are very skeptical of doing that and they have to stop. I am sure they are not going to change their practices, but it is pretty bad luck, I don’t want to make that happen, to have the CEO of a company change their practices. He needs to make the right decision with respect to this. We did not need any more regulations. [p][p][p]In that spirit, let me say. The basic principle for us was to build a company which