The Hindu Business Line : Managers have to resolve the ethical debate and take decisions

TAPPING into the `the world's second largest collection of decision-oriented, field-based business cases' of Ivey Business School, here's David J. Sharp's Cases in Business Ethics, from Sage (www.sagepublications.com).

"A casual reading of the business press shows that the world of commerce continues to present managers with ethical challenges and that, in many cases, the challenges are more than they are able to resist," notes the preface.

"Can that be true?" I ask myself, and dip in to the latest news. On www.thejakartapost.com, there is a letter `1 hour ago' from Patrick Guntensperger about "one of Jakarta's highest profile and most visible companies demonstrating contempt for the public and an utter lack of business ethics or integrity."

A posting dated August 22 on www.investmentnews.com is titled, "`Business ethics' is becoming an oxymoron". How heartening, therefore, to read that nearly all (95 per cent) of the 1,655 respondents surveyed in the US and abroad in the latest `Fast Track Leadership Survey' have said that a CEO's business ethics remain very important and play a meaningful role in the way business gets done.

But the story is not complete, because www.tmcnet.com informs that when asked to grade CEOs on specific attributes, "Respondents said CEOs at large companies `are ruthless in their pursuit of success' (79 per cent) and few believe CEOs `have integrity' (28 per cent)."

It is a sign of the times, then, that Kaplan University has launched new online master degree in `Criminal Justice' and the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, has decided to partner with Sri Aurobindo Institute of Culture to incorporate social values and ethics in its curriculum.

Sharp's book does not aim to provide simple answers to questions of ethics, for there're no simple answers. Nor does the author moralise on business, because that would be ineffective. Instead, he presents "a collection of decisions — messy, real-world business decisions."

Ethics is not merely some abstract desirable idea, states the author, and points out that a society can function only if its members adopt "a code of behaviour under which individuals restrict their self-interest for the greater long-term good of the society."

Though moral issues are fuzzy, being `rarely clearly right or wrong', managers have to resolve the ethical debate and take decisions; and Sharp would remind them that `doing the right thing' involves tradeoffs.

One of the cases is about a new auditor who identifies potential audit risks; he finds out that "managers of seven stores were manipulating net income computations", by meddling with recognition of income/expenses in "two most likely areas", viz. inventories and advertising expenses. Then?

Catch up with Sharp... fast!

Three rules of non-verbal communication

FOR serious professionals, inputs from their own field of study aren't enough. Which is why I thought of including a discussion of The Definitive Book of Body Language, by Allan and Barbara Pease, from Manjul Publishing (www.manjulindia.com).

A common myth is to think that speech is the main form of communication. "Speech has been part of our communication repertoire only in recent times in evolutionary terms, and is mainly used to convey facts and data," write the authors. "Speech probably first developed between two million and 5,00,000 years ago, during which time our brain tripled its size. Before then, body language and sounds made in the throat were the main forms of conveying emotions and feelings, and that is still the case today."

It should make women happy to know that they have "an innate ability to pick up and decipher non-verbal signals," making it tough for husbands to lie and get away with it! "Conversely, most women can pull the wool over a man's eyes without his realising it."

Here's some takeaway: Three basic rules to help you read body language. One, read gestures in clusters. "Like any spoken language, body language has words, sentences, and punctuation. Each gesture is like a single word and one word may have several different meanings," explain the Peases, and say that you'd need at least three `words' before you can make sense of the gesture cluster. Rule 2, look for congruence, between the verbal and the non-verbal signals. The latter carry about five times as impact as the former, and that explains why women disregard the verbal content when they find incongruence, and choose to rely on the non-verbal message. An example cited in the book is of Sigmund Freud who found that a patient of his verbally expressing happiness with her marriage, while "unconsciously slipping her wedding ring on and off her finger".

Rule 3, read gestures in context. "If, for example, someone was sitting at a bus terminal with his arms and legs tightly crossed and chin down and it was a cold winter's day, it would most likely mean that he was cold, not defensive."

Essential read for auditors who'd like to sharpen their observation skills!

BooksOfAccount@TheHindu.co.in

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