Volume 14, Number 4 Article by S K Chakraborty December, 2002
Ethics for Business: Drawing on Indian Values :
Prof S K Chakraborty of the Management Centre for Human Values, IIM Calcutta, and author of the Management Ethics Omnibus, shares the essence of his enquiry into the field for over two decades. To the basic question from students and managers as to what there is in ethics for them, teachers must communicate that ethics has fundamental existential payoffs. Especially in today’s fast-paced world, where patience is no longer a virtue and ‘false gospels’ such as rank ordering and corporate gladiatorism are being embraced in toto by the Indian intellectual elite, without pausing to reflect on their own tradition and ethos.
The foundation of ethics in practice lies in values within. Values are the cause and ethics is the effect. Distorted values or disvalues jostle with positive human values and our actions depend on which of the two is on the ascendant. Thus, it is important to build ethical stamina or moral character. While an efficient institutional and oversight framework is essential to enforce ethics, recent developments have shown that human ingenuity can beat the best surveillance mechanisms, if the will to ethics is weak. In dealing with ethics in the context of management and business, while most people can be trained in compliance ethics, or satisfying the requirements of the law, debacles like Enron will continue unless we can take the next step forward into the cognitive zone, when we recognise the hiatus between ‘correct knowing and correct behaviour’. Once we recognise the gap, we enter the field of consciousness ethics where we can build the courage and the stamina to act upon our knowledge. To be able to put the student through his/her ethical paces, the teacher him/her self must strive to live by what s/he preaches.
In building this ethical stamina, S K Chakraborty reiterates the need to go back to our roots and grow strong on them, to build on the time tested civilisation and culture that is India’s.
Reprint No 02406a