No such thing as business ethics

I want to be ethical, and I believe that you do too. Furthermore, I know it really is possible to do what’s right and succeed in business. In fact, according to the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C., companies that are dedicated to doing the right thing, have a written commitment to social responsibility, and act on it consistently are more profitable than those who don’t. James Burke, chairman of Johnson and Johnson, says, “If you invested $30,000 in a composite of the Dow Jones thirty years ago, it would be worth $134,000 today. If you had put that $30,000 into these [socially and ethically responsible] firms—$2,000 into each of the fifteen [in the study]—it would now be worth over $1 million.”26

John C. Maxwell, There’s No Such Thing as “Business” Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions (New York City, NY: Hachette Book Group, 2007).