Quotes & Sayings About Ethics In Business

Equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow's business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics. — Walter Russell

In just about every gangster movie there is a scene where the mob boss says, 'Hey, I'm just a businessman. — William Hageman

There is no such thing as business ethics. There is only one kind
you have to adhere to the highest standards. — Marvin Bower

Economics without ethics is a caricature. Ethics without economics is a fairy tale. — Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists. — Jerry Saltz

For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them. — G.E. Moore

Google's motto - "Don't be evil" - is in part a branding ploy, but it's also characteristic of a kind of business that's successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. — Peter Thiel

Why are we trying to measure social media like a traditional channel anyway? Social media touches every facet of business and is more an extension of good business ethics. — Erik Qualman

Ben Franklin said:
"Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy wealthy and wise"
Lately I have read the advice given to William Randolph Hearst, when a young man, by his father:
"Go downtown at noon and rob the other fellows of what they have made during the morning. — E. Haldeman-Julius

Lack of ethics is so ingrained in the financial industry that they are not even aware of it any more. It's just business as usual for them. — Robert Rolih

The question is, when so many others cut corners, shave the truth, self-deal, believe in the fast buck, and follow the crowd along the low road of least resistance, can we even afford to travel the high road of ethical behavior? Frankly, we can't afford anything else. Any other competitive angle is a pure crapshoot in today's business world. Companies with shaky ethics and shabby standards will be crippled as they try to compete in our changing world. — Price Pritchett

Living up to your commitments is part of business ethics. My word is my bond. — Isadore Sharp

One thing, Ms. Gray, is forgotten by this tragedy: the embryo is human, not a nonhuman as the Supreme Court declared. Abortion never was about the poor or about women's rights. It's an ideology with an agenda - and it's a profitable business. So, Ms. Gray, I dare say few politicians will speak that truth for fear of political reprisals. I'm not afraid. Politicians and courts made legal what is a morally reprehensible act of brutality. I call it what it is: judicial tyranny. — J.W. Brazier

Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you're due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings. — Donald Van De Mark

The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don't have much wiggle room here. — Seth Godin

Decision making and problem solving are not the same. To solve a problem, one needs to find a solution. To make a decision, one needs to make a choice. — Michael J. Marx

While our managers debated what steps to take to address the sales and cash-flow crisis, I began to lead week-long employee seminars in what we called Philosophies. We'd take a busload at a time to places like Yosemite or the Marin Headlands above San Francisco, camp out, and gather under the trees to talk. The goal was to teach every employee in the company our business and environmental ethics and values. — Yvon Chouinard

We must intertwine business and ethics in a very fundamental way. — Robert Bruner

Ethics and religion must not stay at home when we go to work. — Achille Silvestrini

A new model of heroic capitalism based on principle-driven, free-market entrepreneurship deserves a central place in business-ethics thought and action. — Robert L. Bradley Jr.

If your client has a problem with ethics, a signed contract may not be enough to protect you from expensive litigation. — Paul E. Casey

Economics and ethics are not mutually exclusive. — Lionel Tiger

I'm passionate about creating new systems that are more holistic to humankind. What do I mean by that? I mean, create new systems of business so that people with ethics both exploit their goods and their gifts while not exploiting the earth, exploiting one another. — Billy Corgan

If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. — Robert Noyce

Because we are a globally connected village, we need
to remember that our choices are not isolated. They have
a powerful ripple effect, and that ripple is global. — Linda Fisher Thornton

It is a commonplace executive observation that businesses exist to make money, and the observation is usually allowed to go unchallenged. It is, however, a very limited statement about the purposes of business — Daniel Katz

A healthy corporate culture is built through proper man-management techniques put into action, which in turn aids in shaping a peacefully coherent work environment with healthy interactions capable of drawing out the maximum potential from the employed. — Henrietta Newton Martin

A moral dilemma can be large or small, important or inconsequential, urgent or secondary. One thing is certain: moral dilemmas are ever present. — Michael J. Marx

And now they were weary and frightened because they had gone against a system they did not understand and it had beaten them. They knew that the team and the wagon were worth much more. They knew the buyer man would get much more, but they didn't know how to do it. Merchandising was a secret to them. — John Steinbeck

There's no such thing as business ethics; there's just ethics. And ethics makes no concessions for the real or imagined necessities of making a profit. — Michael Josephson

The ethics of journalism are one thing. Another thing is the ethics of business. — Adam Michnik

You would be surprised at how many corporations "none of your business" applies to! — Steven Magee

Being good is good business — Anita Roddick

I have always believed that a
trademark is the life of an enterprise
and that it must be protected boldly. A
trademark and a company name are
not just clever gimmicks-they carry
responsibility and guarantee the
quality of the product. If someone tries
to get a free ride on the reputation and
the ability of another who has worked
to build up public trust, it is nothing
short of thievery. We were not flattered
by this theft of our name. — Akio Morita

Football, that's just athletics. But in the business world - doing everything - people are competing. So you need good work ethics, and I think it helped me to develop good work ethics, being in a small town. — Herschel Walker

A business is seldom if ever built up except on lines of strictest integrity. — Andrew Carnegie

It horrifies me that ethics is only an optional extra at Harvard Business School. — John Harvey-Jones

Because every exchange is always a relationship, to get the most while giving the least is unjust, unethical, antisocial, abusive, perhaps 'evil.' Yet predatory commerce ("the free market" as it is euphemistically called) operates regularly on the principle of 'get the most and pay the least. — James Hillman

While academic abilities remain integral, it is the work ethics that form the soul of the business. — Jamshyd Godrej

We live in a world where there are a hell of a lot of new inputs that need to be factored in to your business. It used to be just about your employees and your customers. Now there are all the issues about global warming, about sustainability, about ethics and now about gender and the distribution of wealth. — Stuart Rose

The question is where are business ethics and morality if one of the parties wants to dishonor a binding contract, just because in retrospect it realizes it could perhaps have got a better price! — Anil Ambani

Thething I am proudest of in my whole business life is that I do not take, that I never took in all my life, and never, never! will take, one single penny more than 6% on any loan or any contract. — Hetty Green

[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it - the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that - so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don't even wanna be in it! — Nora Ephron

Why should I choose to divide my ethics into four rather than six? Why should I define virtue as four, or two, or one? Why as desist and resist rather than 'follow nature' or 'discharge your private business without injustice', like Plato, or anything else?
'But,' you will say, 'there everything is summed up in a word. - 'Yes, but that is no good unless you explain it.' And when you come to explain it, as soon as you open up this precept which contains all the others, out they all come in the original confusion that you wanted to avoid. Thus when they are all enclosed in one they are concealed and useless, as if they were in a box, and they only come to light in their natural confusion. Nature has laid them down, without enclosing one inside another. — Blaise Pascal

While mistakes may be local, in today's connected world embarrassment is global — Gyan Nagpal

I don't trust a man who talks about ethics when he is picking my pocket. But if he is acting in his own self-interest and says so, I have usually been able to work out some way to do business with him. — Robert A. Heinlein

Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business ... because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people. — Stefan Molyneux

Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing. — Peter Singer

The more moral the people are in their business dealings, the less paperwork you need, the more handshakes you can have, the more the wheels of capitalism work better because there's trust in the marketplace. Business ethics is not a joke. And, in fact, I think most businesses that I've dealt with encourage exactly that type of behavior. — Rick Santorum

Good decision making is the result of years of experience making and learning from one's choices - good and bad. — Michael J. Marx

Using the phrase business ethics might imply that the ethical rules and expectations are somehow different in business than in other contexts. There really is no such thing as business ethics. There is just ethics and the challenge for people in business and every other walk in life to acknowledge and live up to basic moral principles like honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness and caring. — Michael Josephson

Of course, if more people had been organ donors, unwinding never would have happened ... but people like to keep what's theirs, even after their dead. It didnt take long for ethics to be crushed by greed. Unwinding became big business, and people let it happen — Neal Shusterman

Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck. — Raymond Chandler

Relativity applies to physics, not ethics. — Albert Einstein

Having George W. Bush giving a lecture on business ethics is like having a leper give you a facial, it just doesn't work! — Robin Williams

Through your influence, vision, ethics and authenticity you create a better reality for your family, community and organisation, where those around you and those who follow you are inspired to dream, learn and act — Craig Dent

Globalization means that business strategy and business ethics cannot be separated from each other. — Ofra Strauss

Consider the recent financial crisis and its link to faulty reward systems. President Bill Clinton's objective of increasing homeownership by rewarding potential home buyers and lenders is one example. The Clinton administration "went to ridiculous lengths" to increase homeownership in the United State, promoting "paper-thin down payments" and pushing lenders to give mortgage loans to unqualified buyers according to Business Week editor Peter Coy. — Max H. Bazerman

He is Your Customer, the Reason behind Your Customs. — Vineet Raj Kapoor

Interest in business ethics courses has surged, and student activities at leading business schools are more focused than ever before on making business serve long-term social values. — Peter Singer

You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact. — Steven Levitt

I charge my clients for my time and expertise, my heart is free. — Saurabh Gupta

Ethics or simple honesty is the building blocks upon which our whole society is based, and business is a part of our society, and it's integral to the practice of being able to conduct business, that you have a set of honest standards. — Kerry Stokes

In my world, people are always plotting. You
have no idea of all the crimes people in business commit every
day. Like it was nothing. Or there's a set of special rules for them.
Remember when Bush made that whole speech about 'corporate
ethics' last year? What a fraud. You think stuff like Enron or
WorldCom is an aberration? It's only the tip. Business is a religion.
Probably the only one practiced all over the world. — Andrew Vachss

Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with- their "loved ones" or friends or business associates or political rulers- are not merely mistaken, but evil. Observe that this dread leads them to sanction, to help and to spread the very evil whose existence they fear to acknowledge. — Ayn Rand

Unless today is well lived, tomorrow is not important. — Alan Sakowitz

The more big business talks about something, the less of it there is. For example, it 'values' jobs just at the moment when they disappear; it revels in 'autonomy' when in fact you have to fill out forms in triplicate for the slightest trifle and ask the advice of six people to make insignificant decisions; it harps on 'ethics' while believing in absolutely nothing. — Corinne Maier

A friend who attended a prestigious MBA program once told me about the business ethics course he took there. The professor counseled honest business practices for two reasons. First, if you lie or cheat you may be caught, and that would be bad for business. Second, if people in the company know they ae working in an honest business, that will boost morale ... "Tell the truth
because it's to your own advantage," was the counsel. What happens, however, when you inevitable come to situations in which telling the truth would cost you dearly? What happens when telling a particular lie would be stupendously advantageous to you? — Timothy Keller

The code-of-ethics playlist:
o Treat your colleagues, family, and friends with respect, dignity, fairness, and courtesy.
o Pride yourself in the diversity of your experience and know that you have a lot to offer.
o Commit to creating and supporting a world that is free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.
o Have balance in your life and help others to do the same.
o Invest in yourself, achieve ongoing enhancement of your skills, and continually upgrade your abilities.
o Be approachable, listen carefully, and look people directly in the eyes when speaking.
o Be involved, know what is expected from you, and let others know what is expected from them.
o Recognize and acknowledge achievement.
o Celebrate, relive, and communicate your successes on an ongoing basis. — Lorii Myers