Ethics, Scandals, & Corporate Culture

This interview with BEH co-editor Chris MacDonald actually covers a lot more than its title implies. It talks about the breadth of the topic of business ethics, the importance of tone at the top (and the tone in the middle), the importance of being able to talk fluently about ethics within your organization, and more. >>>

LINK: Q&A: How to Instill an Ethical Corporate Culture (Chris MacDonald, interviewed for Promogram—a publication of the Advertising Specialty Institute)

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Q: What advice can you offer small businesses when it comes to ethics?

CM: Small businesses may feel like they don’t have the internal capacity to do what a lot of big businesses can do in regard to ethics. Big companies tend to have things like ethics hotlines and sophisticated ethics training programs. They may even have someone whose job title is chief ethics officer. That’s going to be something a smaller company will feel it won’t be able to do. But there are lots of things smaller companies can do. I remember visiting a small health-care biotech company in Boston that had a weekly brown bag lunch. Sometimes they would also watch a movie with an ethical twist or theme and they would just talk about it. There are lots of steps you can do to build an ethical, healthy culture, and that starts by putting ethics on the table and making it a topic of discussion. Talking about ethics doesn’t mean talking about who has done something wrong recently, but rather what our values are…

What do you think?

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