Today I was sitting in my Managerial and Organizational Behavior class and we had a rather disturbing discussion. The issue at hand was one team copied another teams previous presentation to win a current competition. However, it wasn’t so much the topic that was disturbing but the response of many of my peers when I made a comment about how I thought the team that copied was in the wrong. Apparently the popular consensus these days is that the ends justify the means. Since the other team won, some of my peers felt that what happened was perfectly fine. Is it? Am I just old-fashioned?
I was raised in the South and one crucial part of a Southern upbringing is your honor. You uphold your honor and the honor of those close to you at almost any cost. But how do you maintain honor when your win is tainted? You can’t. That is why you must make an effort to not let winning be everything because it really isn’t. No matter how big the win it will eventually be forgotten, but the path taken to get there will always remain. So who are you? Are you so driven and focused on winning that you are forsaking your honor and ethics to get ahead? Trust me, I have been there and done that, and in the end you will take more pride in your accomplishments when they are TRULY yours.
So how does this relate to business? Simple, when you let the thought of winning take over, you cloud your rationality. Now obviously everyone doesn’t think rationally. In fact, to say all people think rationally is irrational in itself. But don’t most of us try to be rational? Don’t we like to be treated rationally? See, it is all a chain, building upon itself to form the fundamentals of business as we know it. (We must act ethically in order to think rationally in order to be equitable……..) So next time you get too focused (I know, too focused? Trust me, it happens) take a step back and think; “Is this who I am? Will I be happy with my actions in this matter?” because if you can’t answer yes to those questions, maybe you should reconsider your strategy. Ethics is relative to who you are, so make sure to not lose sight of who that really is.
Filed under: Organizational Behavior, Self | Tagged: end justifies the means, ends, ethics, ethics in the workplace, honesty, honesty in the workplace, Honor, lose, means, rationality, sportsmanship, win, winning, winning is everything, winning isn't everything
It is unethical to copy a winning format, for any winning format should have copyright. What you *can* do with it, is use it as a test for your own path to success, assessing what aspect you may have overlooked or ill conceived in comparison. Therefore, basic ethics here are independence and independent confirmation (or rejection), just as they function in science or journalism. In business and politics they are forgotten, because it has turned out to be so ‘profitable’ to copy one anothers winning formula’s as if they were winning stock. However this is root cause of favoritism (discrimination) and even distortion of truth (agreeing on what we shall call true and false regardless of what reality says).