I just read a blog by an old friend named Ajit Balakrishnan where he, in his position as Chairman of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta said he was impressed when a Professor suggested adding ethics to the course content. 

Someone argued that ethics can’t be taught. This, in my opinion, is pure nonsense.

Let’s try and define ethics. Some definitions go this way: Ethical motive: motivation based on ideas of right and wrong; Ethics: the philosophical study of moral values and rules. Ethics: the branch of philosophy concerned with evaluating human action. Some distinguish ethics, what is right or wrong based on reason, from morals, what is considered right or wrong behaviour based on social custom.

I have a much simpler definition, not of ethics, but of ethical behaviour. Quite simply I consider ethical behaviour as behaving exactly how you’d like the world to behave towards you.

For me, this cuts across almost everything. You’d like the world to smile at you, be kind to you when you are feeling down, be considerate of you. Well, that’s what the world will appreciate from you also.

It’s really as simple as that.

Issue based thinking can get confusing. That product hasn’t come out just right – how high should our quality standards be, how much rejection can we afford? That question isn’t the one we should be asking. What we need to ask is would I be happy to receive that product?

I prefer to look at the big picture. If we as a company can behave towards our stakeholders exactly as we’d like them to behave towards us, we’ll do all right.

Its sad that business schools don’t bring the subject up for intense discussion. There will be a sociopathic few who believe that they can behave badly and never be caught. But even those guys when exposed to enough empirical data about the downfall of companies who’ve been self-obsessed to the detriment of their stakeholders will know that it all catches up with you eventually. In the process of a discussion, they will also come to discover what others think.

In our increasingly cynical world, and particularly in India, people assume that to succeed in business you have to cut corners and do shady things, and I cannot deny that there is enough grossly visible evidence of shady people having succeeded.

But there are many of us who managed to make good without ever compromising our conscience and it helps for kids to know about that also.

Good sense tells you to behave in a manner that will earn you approval and goodwill and will make your stakeholders want to continue to do business with you (try us out and be brutal in telling me whether we behaved the way you would have liked us to or not).

So, at the end of the day, ethical behaviour is just simply sensible behaviour.

Ethics can be taught. Not through pontification, but through stories, examples and role playing. And it is certainly worth making the effort to do so.

Stumble it!