Here’s a very nice short article on business ethics, with a particular focus on SMEs (small and medium enterprises). By Hendri Pelser, writing for Times Live (South Africa), Play fair and you will win ^[1]:

With the effects of the global credit crunch still with us, it is pertinent to consider business ethics – the lack thereof helped create the recession. But how does one approach business ethics? In the academic world, it is a philosophical discipline. For companies, it’s often a large volume of rules and regulations. In the arena of small and medium enterprises, however, it simply comes down to the way you and your business behave – and decision makers face a myriad ethical challenges every day. These range from the way the tea lady is treated to the non-payment of suppliers or even bribes and kickbacks….

This piece is nice in a number of ways. Too little has been written, generally, about ethical challenges faced by SMEs, and this article says a lot of smart things about that. But the article really is a good brief primer on business ethics, and an interesting read throughout. My one quibble is with the title of the article, which is misleading (but which probably wasn’t chosen by Pelser, so it’s not his fault). Nothing in the article actually implies that if you play fair, you’ll win. Certainly there’s a suggestion that good ethics leads to a good reputation, which in turn can help a business achieve success. But the relationship between ethics and business success is clearly complicated. In some cases, success is what gives a business a bit of leeway to engage in the kind of overt ethical behaviour that will build its reputation. In such cases, the truth is closer to “win, and you can afford to play fair.” Also, it just cannot be denied that in at least some cases, you’ll play fair and lose. Or, more generally, there are situations in which you’ll lose no matter how you play — perhaps because other companies have better products, better staff, better marketing, economies of scale, whatever. That complexity, of course, is precisely what makes ethics in business a challenge. If acting ethically were a straightforward recipe for business success (and if it were uncontroversial just what counted as acting ethically), we’d see a lot less unethical stuff going on in the world of commerce. ^{[2] [3]}