Ethics to be followed during an audio or telephone conference:

1. The meeting should start with introductions. The people you are speaking to must know who they are speaking to through their voices as they cannot see you in person.
2. The background noises must stay reduced. As people can hear only your voice, even the slightest sound might cause disturbance during the meeting. You should avoid actions like rustling of papers, keep your mobile phone switched off (you can also keep it in a silent mode, but definitely not on vibrate mode). Close the windows of the room for minimizing outside noises.
3. Never interrupt when someone else is speaking. You must be extremely polite in your approach during an audio conference. Again, when your turn of speaking comes never try hogging the limelight. Every time you start speaking, mention your name first.
4. Never take too much time for explaining your views. Your speeches must be short, but fact-filled and relevant to the topic of the meeting.

Ethics to be followed during a video conference:

1. As people participating in a video conference can see each other, you must get properly dressed while taking part in it. Being properly dressed means weaning proper business attires.
2. You should not drink or eat during the video conference.
3. Never perform any activity that might distract the other participants of the video conference. You might feel bored, but never do things like making paper planes, yawning and twiddling the thumbs.
4. Never carry a rude attitude or interrupt other speakers in between their speeches. Listen to every discussion minutely and make a comment only when you are asked to do so.

Never make redundant excuses only for buying some extra time or for getting a few days off:

If you feel that you will not deliver a product within the deadline or feel that you will not be able to complete a task within the given period, you should discuss it with your client clearly. Never give needless excuses just for buying some more time. Doing so will not only slow down your work progress, but will also force the client to start suspecting you and of course your reasons. Make sure that you never lie to any of your clients. This will help you in building long term relationships with them.

Never keep the clients hanging amidst uncertainty:

You must always be transparent with the client. Communication between you and your client must be regular and clear. If you are having issues in understanding the ways of dealing with a particular project, seek help from the client. Never shy away from disclosing your inabilities. Keeping the clients hanging will irritate them more than disclosing your inefficiency to them. If you can’t contact them over the telephone, send them a mail explaining problems in details.

Never neglect the responsibilities given by the clients:

When the client sends you an order, make sure you complete it following all the requirements mentioned by the client. Never deliver the product or declare the job to be completed without accomplishing every need of the client. If a client finds that you are not following the instructions given by him perfectly, he will never come back to you with another project.

Never show disrespect to your client: If you behave with your client haughtily, disrespectfully and rashly, you will never be successful in developing a permanent client base, which will never allow you to achieve the desired success in business. Treat the client respectfully and will utter kindness.

1. Be clear and concise: Majority of the professionals receives hundreds of emails in their mailboxes daily. It’s obvious that most of them don’t love reading long and descriptive emails. So, your email must be short and clear; the recipient must understand the content of the email quickly.
2. Be correct with your spelling and grammar: We often use sentences like ‘r u fine?’ while emailing our friends; but the same cannot be done while writing the content of an official email. Using such sentences in official emails will end up decreasing the sender’s credibility. Also make sure that emails written for official purposes don’t contain other errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar.
3. Timeliness: The best thing about emails is that once the send button is clicked, it requires only a few seconds to reach the mailbox of the recipients. Due to this feature of emailing, in business communication a swift and reliable response is always appreciated. This is the main factor responsible for increase in popularity of Apple iPhone and Blackberries among business people.
4. Add a thoughtful subject line: The subject line is the first thing that the recipient of your email will notice and often it becomes the main deciding factor for the recipient  regarding whether he will open the email or not. Emails having general or obscure subject lines are unlikely to be of high priority. The subject lines of email must summarize the actual content of the email aptly.
5. Attach wisely: In case of intraoffice emails, generally the programs used for viewing the attached files remain the same. However, if you are sending the email to anyone outside your office, you must be a bit more thoughtful. In such cases, use the file types that are most commonly used or if the file type is too uncommon don’t attach it unless it’s extremely important.

As an employee, you must be aware of the fact that information means power. How much successful a company will be is largely dependent on the company’s ability of keeping its formulas, ideas, financial facts etc away from the competitors. Employees must not allow a company’s proprietary information and confidential information to get leaked.

What does the term confidential information signify? Confidential facts of any organization include information about facts and data related to the organization and its employees that were not made public. This may include anything ranging from information about the company personnel to how the company produces its products. The proprietary information on the other hand signifies the trade secrets of the company. This includes all information that provides an organization the competitive edge at the marketplace. Disclosing such facts inappropriately harm companies as well as the employees severely. Two of the most common examples of such facts are: the original recipe of KFC and the formula of Coca Cola. How will you identify the trade secrets of your company? The easiest way of doing that is checking whether the information is displayed on the official website of the company; if it’s not there it must be your company’s trade secret.

The movie Wall Street released in 1987 was made intelligently on the business and investing. The film was renowned for its sharp dialogues and one of them is Gekko’s speech where he has stated that greed is good.  Although the piece of advice is stunning but it has less practical implication. For te past few years t has been observed that greed is actually a peril when it comes to investing as it makes an investor imprudent. Although greed is a necessary evil in functioning a capital system but it can bring potential damages. To give a real life example let me present the case of AIG. After the bailout of the firm in September, the executives of the AIG were caught by an insatiable lust. The result was a decadent retreat by the company to California which had cost about 444,000 dollars. The retreat was followed by a hunting trip that was organize din England and was worth $ 86,000. The news of this momentous spending came under spotlight just few days after AIG received $37.8 billion from Federal Reserve as additional loan after it received $85 billion loan as an emergency funding just a month back.

Released in 1999, the film Office Space portrays nicely the monotonous life of corporate employees. The character Peter Gibbons gives instance to the character Michel where he has nicely stated about work place bullying, monotonous job of looking at a computer all day long, and filling up forms and applications that are of no use to their benefit as a life of boredom. The easy escape out of this life was shown by stealing a good sum form the company where the work. Now the life of thief is not a good deal than a life of a corporate employee, no matter how boring it may be.

The famous book by Mario Puzo and the famous motion picture Godfather had a famous line where the character Michael Corleone says that his business is strictly personal. In no way a business can be personal since every decision in a firm is focused on the betterment of the company as a whole not for the owner himself. This philosophy cannot run in the practical life.

Finally, the film Working Girl released in the year 1988 where a dialogues says that the rules of a company can be broken only when one reaches the top and not when a person is in the way to reach at the helm. This is a traditional outlook towards business and doesn’t account for the contemporary entrepreneurs like Mark Zukerberg who won the race only because he bent the rules from the beginning. Creativity cannot be fostered if traditional a rigid business strategy is not changed.

Green businesses today are valued most both by government and common people. A closer look at a business of this sort compels me to state that an eco-entrepreneur gets dual benefit in today’s environment. The government support in the form of subsidy gives a cost effective route for the business to grow. Furthermore, environment awareness among the common people gifts a green business with a widespread market. Both the forces are just sufficient for an eco entrepreneur to travel towards prosperity.

When the soil is fertile and the seeds are sown, just a little bit of water sprinkling will help a sapling to sprout. This is exactly the task that is left for an eco entrepreneur as the business set up is already made and he is left with the responsibility of product building and marketing. I do believe that government aid is a good support for green businesses, but I cannot overlook the low cost resources that this business requires. Using waste products to make new saleable items is the principle of running a green business. As can be understood, the resources or raw materials are always on tap for a firm of this stripe. This is an additional advantage for an eco entrepreneur as he can start up making the products without a bulky investment. Upon completion of the product making the profit margin will also be fair.

It was just a matter of few minutes to chalk out the plethora of advantages green business involves. The Clock is now ticking loudly to wake up eco entrepreneurs as good fortune is waiting for them.

The intention behind creative accounting is to bring a smoothing effect through accounting practices like stock valuation, accruals, reducing or creating provisions, capitalizing of stocks and off-balance sheet financing. While creative accounting has been seen as a somewhat unethical practice, earnings management (almost synonymous to creative accounting) has not been looked with suspicion. In case of earning management, directors of a firm focus to satisfy investor expectation in stock market through reports produced by stock analysts.

The reason behind adopting creative accounting is solely to make the stocks of a company lucrative in stock market. This will allow investors to tilt towards the company stocks, eventually manipulating investor predictions. The income smoothing, caused by creative accounting, shields volatile profits of a company. This is done typically by making high provisions against asset value and for liabilities during the prosperous years of a company. Later on these provisions are reduced to manipulate the reports.

Such accounting methods are adopted by myriad companies and especially large corporations. Naturally, accountants   produce financial results on behalf of a company in an objective manner. This deceitful approach can be cause potential damage to the invested money on the company stocks. Investors need to be watchful in this matter and must invest prudently.

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.

Lots of companies spend millions of dollars per year on advertisements, serving the community, cleaning up the environment, fighting aggressively against the odds and handling the eco-system. Moreover, they spend enough money to set up good business ethical rules in their company to grow the reputation of the company. Companies with ethical rules have always gained customer importance and it helps them grow for future expansions. Lets take a look at some of the organizations who follow ethical rules religiously based on the type of the business they are doing so as to cause very minimum damage to the environment, the people working in their company, obeying the governmental rules and some have stated their bad experiences too. The business ethics cases allow you take a deeper look as to how company operates and what goes in to building a reputation for the company:

• A winery in California practices its operations keeping in mind the environmental aspects and thus manages to make good profits even after spending money to protect the environment.
• According to Ben and Jerry’s co-founder, Ben Cohen stated that if progressive thinking gets too far of convention it can lead to some disastrous effects to the company. He experiences this when he had started a company especially to help the environment.
• The CEO of Apparel Source Inc., Duncan Berry faced ethical dilemma when he learned that his company produced massive amounts of pollution. He was an ardent environmentalist and believed in greener environment.
• The environmentally conscious companies actually recycle their obsolete computers rather than leaving them in a landfill to fester for years together.
• A young entrepreneur helps the disadvantaged minority section of the society and the younger population to get in the technical position.
• A restaurateur in Philadelphia helps create a social change by donating a part of her profits to charity and also help the socially conscious restaurants network to bring in more customers.

Businesses around the world follow ethical standards set by their own parent companies and also follow the ones set by their government. The business ethics cases provide a deeper view at how the industrial policies work and what the companies ought to be following.

The business and accounting ethics helps you to understand the way business interactions needs to be done, they especially helps when you are one on one dealings with your clients. Some businesses hardly adhere to business and accounting ethics; perhaps this might be the reason why many organizations nearly fail to get good reputation because of the bad debts and inability to serve their customers well. The corporate world is not just about making money, it’s a deeper field that only a true entrepreneur can know given the amount of ethical values he possess. Accounting ethics helps you manage your regular business accounts with no misinterpretation of money account in an organization. Business is all about making money, but the bottom-line is that you should be capable of handling your clients and the investors who are putting in money in your company. Capitalism is the prime most important elements, which plays a significant role in running your business successfully.

The business and accounting ethics are very much part of your business whether we may agree to the fact or no. The businesses globally who have good market reputation are seen to have hardly getting in to business ethics that is the reason why many companies have been charged millions for breaking the business ethical laws. Companies usually do adhere to ethics especially when it comes to customer relationship and not breaking the business laws. Business ethics applies to each and every area of business whether it means breaking the agreement with your partners, showing misinterpreted advertisements on the televisions, child exploitation, such companies get fined time and again for their unethical behavior.