Have you ever done what you believed to be wrong because everyone else do it?

Enlightening. I’ve been reading a chapter related to individual ethics in organisations on the literature about Managing that I am studying at the Open University, and I found out an interesting questionnaire devised by A. Lawton (Ethical management for the public services, 1998). For each question, you have to answer Never, Sometimes or Often.
From the 22 original issues, I would like to quote just some of them:

At work…

- Have you asked a colleague to say you are not in when you are?

Little bit innocent, ok. But what about the next ones:

- Have you told “white lies” to customers or clients along the lines of “the cheque is in the post” when it is not?
- Have you criticised your organisations to outsiders?
- Have you exaggerated your achievements?
- Have you revealed confidential information about individuals to others?
- Have you done what you believed to be wrong because everyone else do it?
- Have you tempered advise to senior managers to give them what they want to hear?
- Have you taken free lunches from clients or customers?
- Have you shifted blame for your mistakes to others elsewhere in the organisation , e.g. it’s “head office’s fault”?
- Have you bent the rules to get things done?
-Have you carried out a task that you fundamentally disagreed with?
-Have you acted in favour of a contractor or client because a bribe (or friendship)?
-Have you discriminated against potential or existing staff on the basis of age, colour, sexual orientation, gender, religion, race, etc?
-Have you manipulated performance indicator so as to reach targets?

This questionnaire is not about measuring your level of honesty. It is really about the several options we have to face in organisational life. It reveals the hard daily work of managing our personal values against the organisational ones. The context, the formal and also the informal procedures and behaviours agreed inside the complex community where we spend 8 hour per day, determines how relative could be the answer for each question above.

How leaders and managers set a context of ethic principles, even contained in the mission statements of the organisation (if they are not forgotten words), determines also the extent of commitment and the sense of identity with the organisation. Even more, the real effectiveness and continuity of the business.

Some "Zen" in management (a new thing)

“Profit should be the result, not the purpose of the business”. I love this idea.

I found it, of course, in a brief and intelligently written description about the Japanese approach to business, that Charles Handy developed for The BBC service some time ago. This is also the key idea that can be derived from the work of Kenichi Ohmae, the so called “corporate strategist”.

Ohmae lives in Tokyo, but he’s a global business consultant, adviser to governments and business entrepreneurs. Even though he has a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technologies, his approach to business management is not based in unnecessary “scientificism” and avoids what I would like to call the “dictatorship of rationality”.

The man that “The Economist” selected as one of the five management gurus in the world, has published over 100 books, one of his famous title being “The mind of the strategist” (1991). Some Zen mentality in business management, perhaps.

This book rescues the idea that the key success factors of business do not come from strict analysis of numbers (a centered focus on the road you are) but from a process which is more instinctive and creative than rational (the alternative better roads). More intuition and less rationality.

I found it worth reading that the Japanese concentrate in three essential factors when deciding business issues:

1. What the customer will want (notice the concern for forecasting needs).
2. Has our company the competence and capacity to respond to the customer demands?
3. Can the business be profitable once the competition starts in the market (notice the importance of considering not only customers needs, but also competitors, which seems to be forgotten in many cases).

All this looks quite simple, doesn’t it? But many times simplicity is not so obvious.

The Japanese seem not to drown themselves in numbers. They don’t focus on profit, before making sure that they can deliver what customers want to receive (of course, the notion of client is complex if you consider that nowadays, it is not only the final consumer, but even all the stakeholders).

The Japanese concern is to be sure that they’ve got the idea of the proper product , the quality level required and the cost effectiveness that competitors can’t afford. Ok, you can say nothing new in management: Assuring budget, time and standards. But the difference is on the focus: only thinking on this first, the profit will come in.