... culture of a firm has a powerful influence on how that firm interacts with society, and a very powerful effect on how people within that firm interact with each other. Understanding and improving its culture could be very valuable to a business firm. Stakeholder trust might be the most illuminating window into the ethicality of its culture, and measuring stakeholder trust might be the most effective practical method of improving the ethicality of that culture. We have in previous posts suggested ...
... economical is perhaps the smallest part of it, yet even this is incalculable. John Stuart Mill (1848)[1] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * In our first post[2] we proposed a universal business ethics principle: “A basic duty of every organization is to earn stakeholder trust.” Our hypotheses are that 1) while cultures and levels of economic development may vary widely, trust is defined by universally shared attributes, sometimes summarized as “character” and “competence”; 2) ...
... a formidable and contentious discussion among business leaders and academics.
While acknowledging all of the contentiousness, we now offer a proposal for a unifying global business ethics principle:
A basic duty of every organization is to earn stakeholder trust.
This principle is meant to replace a more familiar but flawed imperative: that the basic duty of each business leader is to “maximize shareholder value.” [2] Such a duty has never been explicitly written into corporate ...