Interesting Insights on ETHICS by a Corporate Icon

Interesting Insights on ETHICS by a Corporate Icon

By Shashi K. Sharma

I have been teaching ETHICS, mainly to MBA students, for more than 2 decades now. Recently I concluded a cafeteria course on ETHICS AND C.S.R. for the students of PUMBA.

The classes were being held online – which has its pluses and minuses. The plus side was that I could invite experts from far away to interact with the students. One such luminary was Mr. N. R. Narayana Murthy – the iconic founder of Infosys – who addressed the students on March 09, 2021.

It was a very rewarding session in a question-answer format (which was subsequently labelled by many students as “once in a lifetime opportunity”) and covered many interesting aspects of ethics in real, corporate life. I will just mention 2 very impactful points here :

One student asked about grey areas in ETHICS. Mr. Murthy had a very clear and usable answer to that. He said that if we put on the glasses of right ethical values, the grey areas clearly resolve into black (wrong) and white (right) and then one can take the right decision quite easily.

This is a very important point because under the garb of “grey area”, people tend to find an escape route and justify unethical decisions. Mr. Murthy was very clear that with sufficient analysis and understanding based on ethics, the “greyness” in any situation can be quite effectively removed to enable the correct decision to be made.

Another interesting insight which Mr. Murthy mentioned was that a business should not only do the right thing by their customer but should also assess how the product or service being provided would be viewed by the customer’s customers. If business ‘A’ does something for business ‘B’ and that makes business ‘B’ look good in the eyes of B’s customers then ‘A’ can develop a long lasting and rewarding bond with ‘B’ !

I thought that these very practical insights deserve a wider outreach through, inter alia, a blog on the SAMSHODHAN website.