Friday, January 19, 2007

Can Profitability & Morality co-exist

Profitability is of two types: Tangible and Intangible

(a) Tangible

Return on Investment
Cash flows
Dividends

(b) Intangible

Trust of the consumers of the organization
Evaluation of the Organizations profits
Status of the people behind the organization

Morality The only definition which can be given to morality is “That which is selfish is immoral and that which is unselfish is moral”. The natural tendency of every human being; taking everything from everywhere and heaping it around one centre, that centre being mans own individual self. When this tendency begins to break, then begins morality. This is fundamental basis of all morality.

We find that as knowledge comes, man grows, morality is evolved and the ides of non-separateness begins. Morality can be either cultivated or inherited. A smile from the air hostess is morality cultivated and a smile from a child is inherited.

Co-existence of Profitability and Morality (Yes they can and they should)

There is one and only social responsibility of business and that is to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

The question is of whether, in defining the business and understanding it as a moral reality, we should focus primarily on its goal of producing goods and services or of generating profits. A single concept of profit is not by itself sufficient to define what we mean by business.

Even goods and services have to be really goods and services from the view point of enhancing total human existence (P F Camenisch). While quoting the anti-social responsibility perspective of the business Evans reasons that since the society supplies the mandate and power to business, it must respond to social obligations while earning profits.

This is no way means that ethics in business is a means to profit. Morality is an end, a justification in itself. The fundamental basis of trust is moral.