I’m not a suit person, I’ve never been one, and even though I teach at a business college and study business administration, I suspect I will never be one. I’ve never believed in the cosmetics industry, I’ve never believed that a lotion in a bottle would make me beautiful and guarantee me eternal happiness. I want a lotion to help me keep my skin healthy and a healthy skin in itself is beautiful, with or without wrinkles.

I believe in Open Business. I believe that when I produce something and sell it to you, I have to tell the truth about the product. I believe that if my product is good I wouldn’t have to promise you things that aren’t true. I shouldn’t have to promise you beauty and eternal happiness for you to buy my lotion. Sometimes I wonder why I’m planning a business in the cosmetics field, since it seems to be a field that is so different from who I am and what I believe in.

I know there are people like me. I know there are a lot of women using beauty products that help them keep a healthy skin without them thinking the product will bring them eternal happiness. They are fully aware of happiness being up to them to achieve, it doesn’t come in a bottle. I know there are people who believe in fair and honest business. Unfortunately it seems to me that the ones doing fair and honest business are the ones that struggle to keep their business afloat.

Every company needs a mission statement and while working on mine I’ve been thinking about business ethics… or the lack of business ethics. Businesses are built by people, some are like you, others are like me, some are like us, but all of them are people. Some people build their businesses for the future. They want their business to be around for a while and make sure their products are good enough for people to want to buy more. Others build their business for today. They want as many people as possible to buy as much as possible today, without a thought about tomorrow. They promise a lot and their products hardly ever live up to what they promise, but that’s not a problem. When people figure out the product is no good, these businessmen have already moved on to a new product.

Then there are those companies building for the future, and once they have developed a good product people want to buy, they stick to that, no matter what. The world might change, the product might be good for someone, but not so good for someone else. They develop their product, use a lot of money and time to make it perfect. But they overlook one small part, they don’t have all the knowledge and one small part of it might not be so good after all. What should they do? Should they change the product, use more money on research and make it as good as it was before without the harmful part? Or should they try to prove the harmful part isn’t harmful after all and stick to a product they already know a lot about? What would you do and what do you think is the right thing to do? Is ethical business something we should strive for or should everything be about economics? Should we do the business that pays the most and forget all about ethics?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.