The Power of Principles: Ethics for the New Corporate Culture

A Jesuit priest who teaches ethics and corporate responsibility at Loyola Maryland and Georgetown University, Byron shares my point of view that businesses based in ethics are more likely to succeed. There's even a section in his chapter on corporate responsibility--a phrase that he finds in use at least as far back as the 1940s CEO of Johnson & Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson--called "The Partnership Between Profitability and Social Responsibility." CSR, in his view, has four levels: economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary/philanthropic. Too often, though, executives fail to go beyond level 2, and that's when their companies get into trouble. Alternating between examining what went wrong in the corporate culture--and laying much of the blame on spineless board members unwilling to risk their sinecures by questioning practices they knew to be wrong--and trumpeting examples of how to do it right, Byron lays a strong philosophical framework to help make sense of the points I make in Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First about why doing the right thing is good for business. He also looks at some issues as the type of leadership--leaders, he feels, must earn the consent of those led--appropriate compensation for executives, and both personal and corporate integrity. The book is heavily researched, drawing both on the printed literature and on conversations with ethical executives across many industries. And it has a welcome touch of humor here and there, as in this quote from Al Casey, deceased former chair of American Airlines. Casey was not a "murphyist"; Casey's Law states, "If something can go right, it should." Shel Horowitz's award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, demonstrates how to build a business around ethics, environmental sustainability, and cooperative practices--and how to develop marketing that highlights those advantages.

Outstanding book for any person that that works within an organization. Focuses on how one can live a fullfilling life and be still be successful within an organization in terms of being a leader of the team. To lead one must be of high integrity and be willing to serve others. With Enron and other corporate scandals, we seem to have lost track of how to run an organization for the benefit of others (employees, shareholders, customers, etc,)instead of our own personal gain.

What are the ethical and spiritual principles businesses should embrace and incorporate to prevent the problems that affected Enron and others? Examples from a range of corporate scenarios narrow the ideas down to ten 'old' principles and review them with an eye to surveying how business decisions may be tempered by ethical and spiritual considerations. Business owners will find this an essential key to maintaining ethics in a blossoming business structure, and business libraries will find students of business will choose this for classroom debate and discussion.

As business and business schools struggle with the problem of teaching, promoting and practicing ethics, Bill Byron provides a useful guide, not just another ad hominen critique. The decline in corporate ethics needs less lamentation and more solutions. Byron has a solution and he conveys ten core principles that form a positive, prosocial set of ethics for business today. He identifies and outlines "ten classic ethical principles" (pp. 6-7): integrity, veracity, fairness, human dignity, participation (empowerment), commitment, social responsibility, the common good, subsidiarity (delegation) and love. He devotes chapters three through twelve to explaining and illustrating these principles. He has excellent, current examples, plenty of conversations with a variety of leaders, and a clear, engaging way of tying all of these together. His final chapter asks business leaders to reflecton the ten principles, in the form of an open letter to their chilren or employees. One takes the form of C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape letters," offering the devil's own interpretation of the principles. Of course, the best advice is to do just the opposite of what the devil suggests, but reality shows that Satan himself may have won the hearts and minds of some executives. Enron receives a lot of attention. He concludes each chapter with a nice, italized, summary lesson. He draws on civic, business and academic leaders. Byron has had the opportunity to meet and converse with a wide array of leaders. He has been the president of three universities. Now if he could only explain the ethics of Harvard's greed in accumulating a $29 billion endowment. Under social responsbility, Byron takes on Milton Friedman's advice to firms, that they should maximize profits to shareholders, period. Byron does endorse that socially responsble firms must be economically viable. I believe that there is a middle ground, and these include the principles that I teach busines students: Organizations must create wealth, customers, and a sustainable comparative advantage. Social justice comes from the distribution of wealth, but only if firms generate enough wealth -- for shareholders, employees, managers, and customers -- to distribute and to re-invest. Being viable is not enough. Firms and employees have a moral, social responsbility to build or create something of value. The error is in the egregious accumulation of wealth by a limited, unethical few. Money is not the root of all evil. It's the love of money that is the root of all evil. Bill Byron has done it all, from a Normandy paratrooper, to Jesuit priest, to university president, to business ethics professor, to high school principal. As a colleague in his department when he wrote this book, it was a privilege to have him with us, if only for a short time before his next, challenging appointment.