Ethics in Business: Dilemmas and Solutions

Throughout the course of day-to-day business life, the business professionals come in contact with quite a sum of ethical dilemmas. There are various ways to handle these ethical dilemmas, but failure to follow the appropriate manner could result in an unethical outcome. The ethical guides related to the book definitely help students develop an ethical character that is sure to stand out for highly ethical companies. In addition, there are companies that test how ethical applicants are before hiring them, this in turn makes getting the job more difficult and costly. However, despite the high cost and difficulty said companies stay firm to ethics, guaranteeing they get top-of-the-line employees who will act in an ethical manner. Ethics is defined

Egocentric people are characterized as caring only about themselves, wanting their ideas to be heard over the rest, thinking only in his or her interest, as well as manipulative. Empathetic people are described as caring, morally superior, smarter, as well as better leaders. The case goes on to compare egocentric thinking to empathetic thinking. It goes on to explain why egocentric people may diminish company productivity. For example, it gives a case of a business meeting in which egocentric people do not allow the meeting to flow, wasting time and resulting in nothing accomplished. Lastly, it proclaims “Empathetic thinking is an important skill in all business activities.” This is definitely true because empathetic people know what the opposite side desires (he/she are thinking of the other person), understand the other party’s needs, understand the problems of others, and think not only in their perspective but others’ perspectives as well. Another interesting case discussed in the books is Chapter 8 dialing for dollars. In this case, a salesperson is asked to increase his sales because he is below quota and is given free rein on how wishes to accomplish this. The salesperson goes on to commit fraudulent sales to increase his/her sales in order to meet the quota, such as pushing product to customers with false claims and getting his in-law to buy product as a fictional company, knowing that most of the extra sales would be returned. This fraudulent sales then led the company’s accounting staff to believe that demand for the product had increase, when in fact it had just temporarily been tampered with. Thus, it is unethical of the employee to commit these fraudulent sales, because it will only cause the company to ramp up production to have its sold product sent back. Returned product is not the only problem here, one must also