Just about every day in our retail businesses we face situations, from the complex to simple, which challenge our ethics.
It could be a miscalculation by a few cents in our favour to a supplier not billing for some inventory delivered to the discovery or a roll of cash dropped on the shop floor.
How we, as leaders in our businesses, deal with these situations sets the ethical framework for others in the business.
The newsagent who rips cash out of the business for personal spending can’t expect employees to not sneak cash out for their own purposes.
The newsagent who does not report the non invoiced inventory, maybe magazines, cannot complain about customers or employees who steal magazines.
The newsagent who takes stock for personal use can expect the same of others.
We need to embrace opportunities to show our ethical behaviour knowing that how we behave guides how others behave.
Mark
In a perfect world for sure.
Never met a perfect business man either, does not stop you trying though.
Derek I think we all need to try because it could be that this is a defining difference for us.
I understand what you are saying. Agreed.
Talking of ethics I commented here this week about IPS sending me a rose calendar that I had not requested. I wish to unreservedly apologize to IPS and to Adam and Tizzie for this statement as it appears that my husband was asked if we wanted any and he said “yes”.
I have strong opinions on things I know but sometimes I get it wrong and I am very sorry for putting that on the blog when it was clearly not the case.
I believe that IPS are doing their best to change the push model that has been the norm in our industry for far too many years and I am certainly happy to be getting 27% for mag sales.
Sorry IPS I will engage my brain before my mouth next time.
What a women saying she was wrong or may have made a mistake?… Come on June, bet you blamed your husband anyway…
Stuff IPS dumped on us had nothing to do with an alternative to a push model.
I’d go as far as to say that they pushed the push model to new limits, in our experience.
And now, they’re billing us for it.
Further, as far as ethics are concerned, as subbies, it is far easier to work ethically with our new supplier, than it ever was with the paper publishers. Not that we didn’t work ethically before (I’m sure we’d have had a much easier relationship with News, in particular, had we been able to eschew our own personal ethics in favour of their business culture), but there are no dilemmas now. So liberating.
Not to mention a much more understandable billing model. Yay!