The headlines broadcast the ethical failures of our times: a CEO goes to prison for malfeasance, financial officers squander the retirement funds of their company's employees, accounting firms are caught suggesting how to mislead investors who read the profit and loss statements. It's easy to wax righteous after the fact. But often during the demands of decisionmaking, the options don't seem so clear cut as they do once their consequences are played out. The fact is, a lot of ethical questions in business don't start out with an obvious right-versus-wrong kind of choice. Many times ethical dilemmas arise that seem to have valid arguments on both sides of the question. Then what do you do?
A friend of mine once traveled to a Middle Eastern country to bid a contract for his company—a contract that the company badly needed to maintain financial solvency. When he arrived, the country's financial secretary met with him to outline the conditions of the bidding: There were four other competitors, and the competing bids would be due the following day. The secretary made it perfectly clear that in order for him even to review the bid, a two-percent surcharge—read bribe—would be required. When my friend got to his hotel and checked with his competitors in the bidding, he was told that this was common practice in this part of the world. Furthermore, when he called home, his employer instructed him to do whatever was needed to have the bid reviewed. He reminded my friend that the livelihood of his fellow employees rested on his shoulders.
Paying a bribe didn't sit well with my friend, but he was beginning to wonder if his reluctance was based on anything more than his own parochial sense of ethics. Should he try to impose his culture's concepts of what was right, or should he simply comply with the adage, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do?" Besides, couldn't he just see the bribe as a cost of doing business and write it off as an expense? And then there was the whole matter of what could happen to his fellow employees if he refused to submit the contract under those terms. Most likely, people would lose their jobs. So what was he to do?
