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BA101 Week 7 Lecture
Welcome to week seven. This week we're going to be learning about business ethics and social responsibility. Go ahead and select lessons at the top of your screen select week seven - business ethics and social responsibility and then the getting started folder. This week’s learning objective is to demonstrate the importance of business ethics and social responsibility to the long-term success of the business. Your activities for the week include various readings of various articles to read, a lecture, a discussion question on business ethics, and your assignment this week is on social responsibility of business. Again what is required of you this week? well you're asked to read all of the material, ask questions of your professor if you should have any, participate early and often in the discussion forums, and complete your assignments focusing on completeness timeliness and professionalism, and don't forget that critical thinking element which we'll talk more about later on in this audio program.
Let’s first take a look at the week seven lecture business ethics and social responsibility of businesses. During this week's lecture we will discuss the importance of business ethics and social responsibility to the long-term success of a business. What is business ethics? That’s a great question and I'm glad you asked. If you read the papers or watch the news you constantly hear stories about business fraud and how it is so prevalent in today's business climate. If you were to ask my personal opinion, I would tell you that these stories seem to be as common as parents telling their children about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. nowadays it seems that in order to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 organization it requires you to have a Master’s degree in creative accounting and that your moral compass needs to have an on off switch. Simply stated, business ethics is doing the right thing when it comes to your business and your stakeholders by employing a smart, responsible approach that can keep your business around for the long term. When an organization takes care of its employees, its customers, and suppliers and stockholders while at the same time while still being able to make a profit, it's a win-win for everyone. Ethics in business is specifically important when it comes to dealing with customers. Integrity when dealing with customers of your business is essential to building and maintaining strong customer relationships. It’s especially important when it comes to how the business handles customer issues and service. We’ve all seen the businesses that have no problem sacrificing their customer service for dollar signs. While in the short term these businesses might be profitable, we all know people love to talk about bad experiences they have with businesses and sooner or later enough bad experiences will shut you down. there is an old saying that generally speaking when we have a good experience at business well maybe we'll tell a couple of people that are close to us, if anyone at all, on the other hand when we generally speaking he can have a bad experience with a business we will tell anyone that will listen from the cashier at the grocery store to posting it on Facebook. It is just unethical and quite frankly not good that business will not provide your customers with excellent customer service when they have a problem with one of your products.
I’d like to shift gears and now discussed social responsibility of the business. I think you would be helpful again to begin by defining what social responsibility is simply stated social responsibility is an organization's initiative to assess and take responsibility for its effects on the environment as well as impact on social welfare. In today's business climate social responsibility in business is becoming in expectation. Organizations are continuously being told by government, the media, as well as outspoken consumers, about the advantages of acting socially responsible and warned about the risk of lack thereof. Many organizations are seeing that they can gain a competitive edge by appealing to the increasing numbers of socially and environmentally responsible consumers and investors as well as employees. Many business leaders see business social responsibility initiatives as something that might be nice to do but are not connecting it to the expanding the business and increasing their profits. The problem with this mindset is that they are not considering that being socially responsible can make all the difference to their competitive advantage. Organizational initiatives such as volunteering, philanthropy and supporting community improvement initiatives can significantly increase its brand, reputation, and valuation of their business. An advantage to a business being socially responsible is that they can create goodwill among the community it serves as well as increase their trust in the business. In my personal opinion, consumer trust and having a good reputation are some of the businesses most beneficial assets. In fact I will go on to say that without these two things the business might very well find itself out of business. An important aspect to an effective corporate social responsibility initiative is that a business should make sure that they develop the right kind of socially responsible program for their business or one that consumers in the community will find valuable. When initiated properly it can open up a variety of new business relationships and opportunities. The bottom line is that it is effective only with the business a success in their local communities grows but their businesses culture as well. You can become a culture where the employees enjoy coming to work and where the community will choose to buy their products from.
We’ll end this lecture by briefly discussing the three main approaches to corporate social responsibility and what they mean. The responsibility project is where a company assigns groups to undertake projects that establish standards planning and evolution of various aspects of the business. The responsibility program is where companies become more proactive and comprehensive, and the responsible business is a business understands its actions can actually improve and evolve healthy systems and responsibility becomes fully an integral to the way all business activity and thinking is conducted.
There are several articles for you to read in this week's folder. The two that I would really like for you to take some time on are: the decline of ethical behavior in business, and social responsibility. takes some real time to read these articles for the decline of ethical behavior the author makes a really valid point that MBA students and engineering students and foreign students as well as US students are cheating repeatedly in their programs of study and they make the argument that if they're cheating in their programs of study what's going to happen to businesses once they leave school and go into business. They’re going to take those beliefs that it's okay to cheat with them into business. so some of the solutions that the author of this article are talking about is the importance to acquire , utilize, and maintain reliable and valid information database bases and to check on whether out of now fraudulent data are provided to companies or whether companies are the victims of data shaving or data shading and quality professionals need to keep an eye out on that and start to think about the importance of creating an ethical culture and enforcing ethical behavior not just for upper management but throughout the entire organization. the author continues on by discussing some solutions which entail establishing internal systems for the periodic sampling review and assessment of critical databases for reliability and validity, ensuring that among the guidelines provided to external suppliers, ethical expectations associated with the provision be clearly specified, and that the consequences of failure to comply with the standards to be swift, severe, and unambiguous, and to encourage upper and middle level management to participate in meaningful education on the process by which ethical decision-making and business and industry can be accomplished. The author goes on to say that telling employees to do the right thing just isn't effective. Ethical dilemmas are not clear choices between breaking the law and being law-abiding – they are at times complex moral mazes with no easy answers. It’s not illegal to place the health of the company and investors’ money into risky investors for short-term profits, but a case can be made that it is unethical. The good news is that these moral mazes can be better navigated if employees are trained in ethical decision-making process and principles.
The second article in this week's reading activities includes one on social responsibility and is entitled “why companies can no longer afford to ignore their social responsibilities” and it was written by knowledge at Wharton. I’ll read a little bit of it to you:
In 1970 the economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman published an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled the social responsibility of businesses is to increase its profits. In the article he referred to corporate social responsibility programs as hypocritical window-dressing and said that business people inclined towards such programs reveal a suicidal impulse. Even four decades later at a time of growing public concern for the environment, his views represented the general skepticism and contempt with many in corporate America viewed corporatists society responsibility. Times however have changed. There remaining company chieftains who take their Friedman-esque view of cores but many more have made CSR a priority. 10 years ago for instance only about a dozen Fortune 500 companies issued a CSR or sustainability report now the majority does. More than 8000 businesses around the world have signed the UN global compact pledging to show good corporate citizenship in the areas of human rights labor standards and environmental protection. The next generation of business leaders is even more likely to prioritize CSR. According to data released this month by net impact the nonprofit that aims to help businesses promote sustainability - 65% of MBA surveyed say they want to make social or environmental difference in their job. Today amid a lingering recession that has dented corporate profits and intensified pressure from shareholders companies are devising new CSR models. rather than staffing a modest CSR department and slapping it on the org chart as a small offshoot of the public relations were philanthropy division many companies are instead trying to embed CSR into their operations. Some blue-chip companies such as these that are creating new markets in the developing world by closely aligning social causes with their overarching corporate strategies. Others such as Wal-Mart have made ambitious commitment to sustainability as a way to save money and tightened their supply chain.