Page 9 - BusinessWest February 7, 2022

if it can’t move or cut 500 employees, and the people in Tennessee think it’s a great thing. In Springfield, to someone who just lost their job, it’s a bad thing. What is the right thing? It depends son your perspective.”
DePergola: “This is certainly my reality in the world of clinical ethics — that the good thing
to do is very often, if not exclusively, the least bad thing to do. And I mean that in a very literal sense. It’s not a clear or easy decision between choosing something clearly good or something clearly bad; you don’t need an ethical analysis for that. It’s often choosing something that will have indirect and unintended consequences that are negative and that are unavoidable in pursuit of something good, like maintaining the structure of the company — somewhere. So, really, finding the good is very often a matter of trying to iden- tify the least bad thing to do, knowing that a per- fect solution is not possible.”
Cutting: “For the management staff at Smith & Wesson, it was a tough decision to make; you’re going to have to let some folks go, but you’re
MARK CUTTING
“If I ship a bad product to a big customer like Boeing, and there’s failure, I’m destroyed in my business and in my industry. It’s a top-down, flow- down thing to make sure everyone’s on the same page concerning the ethics that you believe in.”
“You’re built on
reputation, and it’s
easy to lose your
reputation and very
going to be able to maintain your stock value to your shareholders, which, under those condi- tions as a publicly traded company, is part of your mission statement. You’re there to provide the best and most absolute path to success for that company. It’s a slippery slope when we make decisions like that, and I think, unfortunately, maybe we need to look in the mirror in this state and say, ‘was that the right thing for us to? Maybe we should claw that back, re-embrace them, and change the law.’”
BusinessWest: Just how does leadership set the tone when it comes to business ethics?
Doran: “You have to show, not tell. Every- thing a leader does is under scrutiny — they’re being watched with a magnifying glass. But it’s equally important to have a written statement. We all have values, personal values, but it’s very important to have an organizational framework ... it’s really important that everyone understands where an organization stands when it comes to
estly with everyone — in our case, students, fac- ulty, staff, everyone in the ecosystem.
“Everyone in our university, whether you’re a trustee or alum, has a social compact to abide by a common value set and code of ethics, and that was really tested through COVID. Everyone had to support this code of conduct; it was testing,
it was mask wearing, it was ... maybe you have a relative in Rome and you want to visit them, but you can’t do that, because it’s not good for our community. So the code centered not on what’s good for you, but on what’s good for our commu- nity at large, and that was a really good example, I think, of this code of conduct and how leaders set the tone.”
Cutting: “When it comes to people being ethi- cal or a company being ethical, it has to be top down. It starts at the top, and it has to flow down to everyone in the company. You talk about the reputation in the industry ... it doesn’t take long
Ethics
Continued on page 44
PATRICK LEARY
hard to get it back.”
things like integrity, inclusivity, and dealing hon-
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