Based on Bird's notion of a good conversation, a normative framework for ensuring the effectiveness of such discussions is advanced. Bird argued that the discussion of business ethical problems should be vocal, reciprocating, issues-oriented, rational, imaginative, and honest. It is argued that these characteristics should also apply to the discussions within the strategic control process if the process is not to be dysfunctional. Ethics and the moral obligations of management were an accepted component in the planning process during the early development of corporate strategy as a field of study. It is proposed that ethics must be brought back into the planning process in order to build trust on the part of all of the stakeholders of the firm.
Trust generates commitment.
Commitment ensures effort, and effort that is cooperative, innovative, and strategically directed is essential to success in a competitive global economy. Ethics should be central, not peripheral, to the overall management of the firm. Social scientists investigating individual's schemes of action have continued to develop categories of meaning that are shared by the strategic management discipline. The framework of Strategy as Moral Philosophy, with the corporation as a rational-moral agent, now makes this sharing much more direct and explicit. While strategic management theory integrates the functional areas of management, together with their source disciplines, moral philosophy now seems to be reemerging as the host discipline for an evolving reintegration of the social sciences.