Business Ethics

_{Photo by Charles Forerunner on Unsplash}

In the previous post, I discussed the reasons to be ethical. In short, ethics provides leverage. This post addresses points specific to businesses.

Competition and Revenues

Most profitable companies create a monopoly. ¹

• Example: Google, Facebook, Amazon

Monopolies are bad for innovation long term. Competition is good for innovation.

Often publically traded companies listening to shareholders focus on short term gains while neglecting ethics.

• Example: Slave Trading Companies during the Colonial Era. ²
• Recent Example:
  • Facebook is known for copying features from smaller competitors then purchasing them
  • Amazon is known for bankrupting competitors by:
    • Investing in companies then launching their copy of cheaper product under Amazon brand ³.
    • Forcing business to be sold to Amazon by selling the same product at a massive loss and waiting for a competitor to go bankrupt before restoring price. ³

Some companies choose to stay private, avoiding being influenced by shareholders.

• Example: SpaceX

If your business is no longer needed, pivot and move to something else.

Customer

Your goal as a company is to help your customers. ⁴

If you cheat, you’ll create a bad word of mouth about your brand. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing strategy.

Be the kind of business whose customer wants you to succeed. ⁵

Protect customer data by providing 100% encryption. Even you should not be able to read it.

Employee

The more you take care of your employees. The more employees take care of you. ⁵

Companies should run on ideas, not hierarchy. You have to let the best ideas win. Which means that people at Leadership position should listen to their employees and sort out solutions. ⁶

Footnotes

1. Peter Thiel ↩

2. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari ↩

3. The Amazon monopoly and the problem with Jeff Bezos’ business model ↩ ↩²

4. Mark Cuban ↩

5. Simon Sinek ↩ ↩²

6. Steve Jobs ↩