As part of a long-term research project, I identified five competitive strategies common to organizations that are successful and ethical on a sustained basis. None of these strategies considered alone guarantees ethical success. I have been sharing these strategies through a series of posts. Here is the final strategy in this series.
I once worked with a CEO who temporarily suspended all of his company’s significant operations in Mexico because he couldn’t find a way for his managers to uphold the company’s ethics while doing business there. This is an extreme example of an important practice, which is looking at business opportunities in terms of their ethical implications. While this is especially important internationally, there are also business opportunities domestically that are hard to pursue ethically. For example, it is particularly difficult to pursue an ethics strategy in a market in which competition is based entirely on price. The time to exercise ethical judgment is when you are considering an opportunity as opposed to when you are in the middle of regretting it.
Mark Pastin 