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Making Money With Commercial Ethics

 

ICS creates higher performing, more profitable organizations through its proprietary modeling of commercial ethics (the Commercial Ethics Application™), and less-tangible asset performance (the Enterprise Endurance Methodology™).

 

What difference does ethics make in business?  If your company has a typical ethics program either resident in the Compliance & Ethics, Human Resources, or Legal function, then the answer to the question above is that it doesn’t make much difference at all, and in most cases it’s working against you.  Typical ethics programs (values based) have never created a single additional ethical person, or contributed to a more ethical company culture.  Values based ethicist’s claims about improving company culture are simply false because at the core of the ‘values’ idea is morality and character of the practitioner to the extent that behavior should be more like this, and less like that.  With it’s roots in Corporate Social Responsibility, values based business ethics instructs that corporations, and their agents, should behave in a utilitarian way - that a social or moral contract exists between the corporation and society beyond the laws that society has already created to regulate corporate activity;  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

add to that the fact that transnational corporations deal with many different societies and their beliefs.  Such a ‘civil bond,’ however, is a cost and detracts from corporate performance relative to specialization.  Meanwhile, authentic enduring corporate performance in of itself is the greatest source of social benefit there is.  Ask anyone in a region with an unemployment rate of greater than 4.5%.

 

Commercial ethics, however, can significantly improve profitability and lower risk.  The profit drivers are the results of highly performing organizational culture: a) innovation, b) productivity, and c) alignment as the lowest cost path to achieve strategy.  It can not be done, however, through typical values based ethics programs which don’t impact company culture.  Very few values based ethicists can even accurately define what company culture is.  The impact on culture can only come from clarity on commercial ethics, authentic governance, top-down demonstration of commercial ethics, the investment in less-tangible assets, and brand response.

 

The flaw with values based business ethics is that values ethicists believe that ethics is an understanding of what is right and wrong.  But for whom?  The business, society, the individual?  Ideas of right and wrong are limitless across the spectrum of ethical philosophy.  It has to do with the judgments, choices, and standards, of thousands of diverse cultures.  Commercial Ethics is about focused judgment that impacts the long-term performance of the corporation, but not at the expense of social needs as you will come to understand.

Your Compliance & Ethics program: moral watchdog or economic engine?

ICS’ Commercial Ethics Application

If you provide a business methodology to the Compliance and Ethics function, expanding its responsibility, influencing eighteen functional areas of the corporate enterprise, you can achieve far greater performance and profitability, and greater corporate legitimacy, while having lasting developmental effects which boost innovation and stabilize regions long-term, and seed emerging markets which you’ll have an enduring access to and loyalty in.  In effect, you will co-create and push out the 21st Century capabilities front while benefiting from it.