Good Ethics With Good Profit Urged
By Mark E. Ruquet
NU Online News Service, March 18, 12:58 p.m. EST, New York City?Business leaders find trouble when their focus is on the perpetuation of wealth instead of a clearly defined commercial objective, an ethics professor advised a meeting of insurance professionals here.
The observation came from Dr. Ronald F. Duska, professor of ethics from The American College in Bryn Mawr, Pa., speaking at the "Ethics Awareness Luncheon" of the New York Chapter of the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter's Society last week.
The talk, entitled "Harry Potter, 9/11 & Enron: Ethics Implications for Financial Services Professionals and CPCU's," drew an analogy between the moral equivalents found in the characters from the best-selling book by J.K. Rowling, the terror attacks and the Enron scandal.
From an ethics stand-point, Dr. Duska compared Enron to a scene in "Harry Potter" where Harry's cousin Dudley receives 35 gifts for his birthday and becomes upset because it is the same number of gifts he received the year before. He wants one more gift.
"Think of Enron as Dudley," Dr. Duska reasoned, "Dudley is an accumulator. One who wants more and more for the sake of wanting more."
The analogy, he pointed out, is that Enron's executives lost their focus for their company, leading to its downfall.
"Businesses do not exist to maximize profits," Dr. Duska opinioned. "They exist to provide goods and service to others."
The drive behind a business, he added, should be to maximize profits, but profits should not be the goal.
"Counter to conventional wisdom, I want to suggest that while accumulating wealth is a goal, a company begs for trouble when it becomes the primary goal, for then there is no compass to use to check one's direction," reflected Dr. Duska.
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