Business ethics and its widespread absence

It is amazing how the banks that precipitated the economic crisis as we know it today have got off the hook without so much as a rap on the knuckles (just some public reprimands that don’t amount to much). In fact, it is a remarkable feat on the part of their negotiators to not only get them off the hook but also managed to get money out of the taxpayers pockets to fund their own pocket. If this is not daylight robbery, pray tell what is? Financiers at AIG, a symbol of corporate greed now, were given millions of dollars by way of bonuses simply because they completed a transaction. But who would stop and think about the consequences of those transactions? Not AIG, that much is for sure.

For shattering the world economy and sending it into a tailspin from which it will take years and years to recover for some countries, these executives were handed fat rewards that they should never have received since it was directly responsible for the damage caused to millions of lives. People talk of a lack of regulatory force and simple human oversight but what caused this mess in the first place is a lack of business ethics and plain greed more than anything else. Forget the misguided incentive programs that linked executive rewards to share value. Focus instead on the debilitation of conscience and the breakdown of the human factor. A strong sense of business ethics that should never have let this happen instead.

There is a strange symbiosis of thoughtlessness and evil working here and what is amazing is that AIG officials found it (and perhaps still do) to be perfectly normal to receive these disproportionate rewards. It is a gross sense of entitlement that has disemboweled economies the world over. It is so removed from reality as to be almost delusional in its perpetration. There has been an extraordinary amount of diligence applied to the singular agenda of personal advancement and it is almost done with complete disregard for anything else. That remoteness from ground reality is perhaps more evil than the sum of the instincts that caused this damage in the first place. It is an economic holocaust in which nations have been obliterated.

It is a strange business model that so brazenly disregards business ethics, and the dilemma is a widespread and individual one about morality and its role in the workplace. There is a widespread acceptance of the rewards that the system offers, but a refusal to accept responsibility for the fallout of the system betrays a serious bankruptcy of business ethics. Bankers, brokers and financial specialists were all in on this while at the same time being completely shut off to the human side of their transaction. It is narcissism pure and simple and it runs every deep, its ultimate expression in the banking system. Never should businesses operate along their own selfish interests; humanizing the financial system is the need of the hour, but there isn’t the political or organizational will to get it done.