Captive Adaptations

Ah, all you cynics must be saying, “business ethics” - that is an oxymoron. And so, this entry might well be the shortest blog entry ever written ! Hold on, as always there is more to it than meets the eye.

Alright, for the past 2 weeks, I have gone through some serious battles in my mind about ethical decisions, since I have decided to switch companies. Again !?, you ask, yes again !. Mostly I am a spontaneous guy, but with matters concerning my profession & decision making regarding my career, there is a lot of systematic reasoning involved. Its very uphill, uneasy turmoil, simply because these are significant shifts in relationships, and for me that is serious business, and hence its not just another job hop.

So every time I do this, I have to justify it ethically more than monetarily, and I believe most of my decisions to switch, stem primarily because I disgree one way or the other on the means to achieve the goals rather than failure to achieve goals. Well, let me explain, I can confidently claim, that achieveing the desired goal in terms of numbers, deliverables, deadlines, has become quite an everyday activity, and its a given, but the bigger challenges for me has always been justifying the means.

With that background, I can fairly say that I am more inclined to the deontological doctrine of ethics, rather than the teleological doctrine. Mostly, I think I am a hybrid, lets not digress, these are huge topics in themselves, so lets save these for another day. Why am I so inclined on means to achieve things ?, and why does that strike a discord among some people I work with ?. For me the answer is obvious.

Ethics as most people perceive, is not about following a set of “absolute principles”, which are in someways divorced from or imposed on our everyday life. Ethics are how we are and how we go about doing things. (This is clearly means not the end). Its an art of compromises, that can still generate mutual benefits. And if your supervisor cannot see that his/her “means” of achieving a desired goal, will render may people in the team dissatisfied, then even though the goal is achieved, success is defeated. And in such cases, one must stand and fight for “ethical treatement” and not compromise, simply because they are disadvantaged. Not being able to make reasoned decisions, and to just follow orders is itself a failure of logical authority by your superiors, and plain assertion of positional authority. Both of these I have blogged before as well.

Now if that happens for a sustained period, inspite of repeated requests and efforts from your end, that is when its time to quit any engagement, since neither is the means appropriate nor is it any longer mutually beneficial, and that is how business ethics I think should be practiced.