Ethics aren't one size fits all

- It would be so easy if ethics were a one-size-fit-all environment. If we had right and wrong answers all the time, you could point to one versus the other, confidently go home knowing, "Yep, I did the right thing." That's just not reality. We have different cultures in our countries, we have different cultures within a company, and we have different expectations even within a country. The United States, for example, you know, there's the price. You pay the price. Everybody else pays the same price. Until you go buy a car. How you deal with the vagarities, the gray areas of ethics, which as we've said are not black and white, it's going to determine your success as a leader. You have an expectation to uphold. That expectation is that you're going to behave as an ethical person and you're going to represent your business as being an ethical business. So this is a very important discussion that we ought to have and we want to establish in our dialogue a set of guidelines and things to help you think about, so you can proceed through that gray area and maximize the possibility that you're going to come up with a good, sound, ethical answer. The key to understanding how you should act ethically, or what it is that constitutes ethical behavior, is to understand the norms for where you are at the moment, right? So there's the culture of your organization. There's the culture of your country. There's the laws within your country. There's the expectations you've established, and being consistent maybe in how you behave with your peers, with your customers, with your management team. To extend the thought of one size doesn't fit all from ethics, and the fact that it's simply not a right answer versus a wrong answer, the reality that we have to discuss is that some ethical situations are going to present themselves to you, and we'll debate some of these, where not only is it not a right answer or a wrong answer, but it's this ugly answer versus that ugly answer versus this ugly answer, or things like, I have this ethical premise to uphold and this ethical premise to uphold, and I've got a situation that I can't do both. I'm going to compromise one by supporting the other. Leads to some interesting conversations, but they're not academic. They're not academic, they're real. They happen in situations. We're going to talk about some real cases where that is exactly the instance of what managers had to think through, one ugly situation versus another ugly situation, and how do you create the best outcome?