Day 2 -- Ethics

1. Though the primary purpose for doing business is to make money and get profit, business owner and employees can’t do whatever they want only based on their business interest.  They first have to be honest citizen. They have to be responsible for the entire society.
2. In typical business operation, one may encounter many different issues such as: environmental issues, corporate restructuring, employee privacy issues, diversity in race and genders, sexual harassment, conduct of multinational corporations (bribery), and other illegal operation conducts.
3. Ethics normally can’t be clearly defined as black or white, right or wrong. The gray shade areas make the ethics be relativism.  There are four type of relativisms: naive relativism (individual standard), role relativism (private and public roles), social group relativism (social norms to render ethical judgment), and culture relativism (moral standard under different culture).
4. Stakeholder analysis provides a tool to weight various elements and reach a decision. It evaluates all the harms and benefits to every stakeholders including the decision maker, executives, customers, shareholders, supplies, government, special interest groups, affected communities, the environment, future generations, competitors, as well as the layers and court.
5. US government passed a law in 2002 to regulate the ethics for business conduct. The law is called Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002, which legislate ethics in corporate America.  This law includes four group of rules: Financial accounting rules, Internal control rules, executive ethical conduct rules, and ethical conduct rule for related parties.