There are times when I feel something close to a sense of despair.  It has to do with a simple question – should a business take seriously the call to do right? The despair comes from what I read — in a lot of places/books/articles, but especially in the book I have recently completed, All The Devils Are Here, on the financial meltdown.  The failure to do right is absolutely pervasive throughout the narrative.

Doing right is different from doing good.  Doing good is a corporate initiative – you know, be involved in philanthropy, give back to the community.  These are very good things to do.  But doing good is not the same as doing right.  Doing right has to do with doing the right thing, in spite of the consequences to the bottom line, the profit, the promotion.

I am in the midst of a personal quest regarding this call to do right.  I am talking to people, asking professors, and authors, and business people.  And in the course of this quest, I found this paragraph, which comes from the inaugural issue of Ethikos, July/August 1987, The Ethical Education of an MBA by Andrew Singer:

The task of “influencing ethical behavior” is made more difficult today—at least in the view of some faculty members—because students arrive at graduate school less well prepared—ethically speaking—than students in the past. “The training on ethical and moral issues is considerably less than was seen previously—in the church, the home and the school system,” says Horniman. “And since each has less influence, they don’t support each other. The schools are terrified to talk about moral issues such as promise-keeping, truth-telling, etc.” 

There seems to be a popular view that one has to be amoral to succeed in business. Each year NYU’s Lamb presents his class with a case study of a pharmaceutical company that discovers that one of its drugs has been killing 20 people a year. He tells the class to imagine they’re on the company’s board of directors. Do they pull the drug from the market? Or try to “contain” the crisis? 

“Invariably, they decide to fight the FDA and sell the drug abroad,” reports Lamb. 

Lamb then asks a second question: Would you want your own doctor prescribing the drug? 

“Invariably, they say no.” 

The case usually “sparks” a lively discussion about ethics and corporate responsibility.

This presents a great, short, to the point case of doing right vs. doing bad.

I think we need a movement – a  movement that takes us beyond doing good to doing right.

What about you?  Would you do right?