Nail Souilamas's Blog

Business Ethics and Strategic Decision making

No matter what field of work or study one chooses to be a part of, ethics are something all individuals share and have to work with.

As defined by Peter Singer in Encyclopœdia Britannica, ethics, “also called moral philosophy, is the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad, right and wrong.”*1

This applies to all disciplines and may affect decision making depending on culture, level of education, and personal belief systems. In business, decision making in relation with ethics has a lot to do with considering stakeholders, their interests, their needs, but also their satisfaction levels, especially for clients you want a quality relationship with. Even though being as global-minded as possible in this sense is important, it is also necessary for decision-makers to choose whose interest they will consider the most, and that can pose serious ethical problems.

Executive businessmen and women make decisions which will impact numerous workers, managers, consumers, but also their families, possibly their friends, as well as their competitors, personal enemies, and many more. Regarding this, it is easy to realize that making large scale decisions will always benefit some people while it would most certainly harm others. This involves ethics because most sane human beings wish no harm or as little harm as possible to others, except exceptional cases where major competitors might be involved, so as part of the decision-making process, an inherent but often unspoken part of the job is how much harm can be done, which involves a process of minimization through an understanding of the stakes.

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For example, the company Anglo American, one of the biggest mining company in the world made statements regarding business ethics as they initiated some major programs regarding strategical decisions and the consideration of stakeholders. One of those statements was “Though providing strong returns for our shareholders remains our prime objective, we do not believe that these can or should be achieved at the expense of social, environmental and moral considerations. Indeed a long-term business such as ours will only thrive if it also takes into account the needs of other stakeholders such as governments, employees, suppliers, communities and customers.”*2

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What we see here is a company that has a global interest in mind when it comes to making decisions, or at least says so. But situations where the effects of one’s decisions aren’t clear can sometime backfire as unexpected repercussions arise in major ways. This raises a question, can ethics, especially in real-world situations and decisions, really be reliable? In other words, can an argument really be made against a certain decision if it relies on the ethical implications of parameters than cannot fully be controlled and/or predicted?

This question raises a million others, most of which I believe have multiple answers. This is why ethics are not to be taken lightly, as they are a vast subject which touches everything from possession of material goods to the very morals of any human being who possesses power.

Feel free to discuss it in the comments, this was my personal take on Business Ethics and Strategic Decision making.

Naïl Souilamas, BCom student at The University of British Columbia: Sauder School of Business

Word count: 438

Text sources:

*1: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy

*2 : http://businesscasestudies.co.uk/anglo-american/business-ethics-and-corporate-social-responsibility/what-are-business-ethics.html

Image sources:

*3 : http://luxebeatmag.com/global-etiquette-european-business-meetings/

*4 : http://www.youthvillage.co.za/2017/04/engineering-learnerships-anglo-american/