41/100: Ethical Breakdowns
Max H Bazerman and Ann E Tenbrunsel write about Ethical Breakdowns in organizations. They are concerned about the sort of ethical problems that happen with perfectly good people, who are responsible family men and reasonable neighbours, do wrong things. Indeed, there will be corporate greed, cowboy businesses and an eternal hide-and-seek with regulators, but we are to assume business to be a positive force in the society, which can get us out of the current recession, we need to have our faith back average businesses run by average people: That way, this is an interesting essay to read. The authors point to five barriers to an ethical organization: Shall we say five excuses. To their credit, the barriers they cite sound remarkably familiar. It is worth recounting them here, therefore: First, there are Ill-conceived Goals. To quote, "we set goals to promote a desired behaviour, but they encourage a negative one". Edward Demming talked about the role quantitative goal-setting ...