Joseph Badaracco Jr. explains in the Harvard Business Review the reasons why the impact of ethics on the bottom line is so elusive. Corporate mission statements and ethics codes are too general to be of practical help. In the trenches of business, people like Paul Haney, director of Ethics in Corporate Compliance at Lockheed Martin Corporation, are creatively and seriously attempting to breach the gap between business schools and real work dilemmas. He has invented a Monopoly like Board game used by its 170,000 employees, who are organized into teams with the objective of choosing the most ethical response to a host of actual cases with ethical dilemmas. Categories include charging practices, conflict of interest, discrimination, falsifying records, gifts and gratuities marketing practices, quality assurance, retaliation, sexual harassment, and use of company resources.
Possible responses presented are subtle, with varying degrees of effectiveness.
Teams accumulate points for the best responses and proceed to the finish. A rare business mogul will establish her own ethical guidelines. Rose Blumkin, a Russian immigrant who founded the Nebraska Furniture Mart in 1937, and died last summer at the age of 104. Because the Federal Sentencing Guidelines of the 1980's reduce the legal penalties of corporate ethical violations, when corporations engage consultants to upgrade their internal ethical practices, they are buying a kind of insurance policy. And perhaps this admixture of business and religion is but the newest example of unconventional religious expression which marks out a different space and different time than those of classical religions.