Ethics and Values in my life There are many values that revolve around my life for a better life, but the 5 important ones are: 1. Integrity - Do the right thing! This is the most import value and I consider it to be the foundation of achieving a better life. 2.
Courage- Face your fears accept and take on new challenges. The moral and mental strength that allows for the acceptance of new challenges without regards to the fear that may lie beneath. 3. Contentment - The pursuit of contentment is a state of mind established by fulfilling your basic needs. 4.
Action- Do not wait until tomorrow when it can be accomplished today. 5. Respect To treat people as you would like to be treated. I operate on two value systems in my professional life. This is not necessarily a negative approach since they don’t conflict with each other in fact, they go hand in hand.
I believe that your personal values drive your professional values. You don’t just develop professional relationships in a work environment but informal relationships too and sometimes they can be more important as it can drive people to take decisions for the benefit of the organization.For example, having good ties with your direct subordinates can help to retain employees. One can’t always put a price on a comfortable business environment and it maybe the reason workers remain loyal to the organization. In another instance, to achieve contentment one works hard to have access to basic needs and that means doing your job well which is in line with professional competence at work. Before I took admission in the MBA program, I worked as a business partner of a small clothing business in my country.
My partner was a good friend and my decision to start a business with her was her commitment to providing unique designs of clothes that maximized customer satisfaction. I often thought of expanding the business but she decided to grow slow as fast expansion can often be uncontrolled and it can cause compromise on quality. Although I agreed with her premise, I thought it could be done in a harmless way. I was approached by an acquaintance who offered to supply cloth for our business. I jumped to the idea as one part of expansion was to build a strong supply chain.I discussed the idea with my business partner who was interested but pointed out that we can’t just take this decision because I knew the potential supplier personally.
We have to carry out research before we make a decision since we can’t risk our business and the money of our two investors. While we tried to establish an idea of the reputation of the supplier, I was offered generous gifts by her and was tempted to take her offer because I assumed her principles and commitment to perfection on the basis of what I knew of her past.She also offered to invest in our business which was a very attractive offer. A person who had a personal stake in the business would ensure best standards of operation. From what we got to know about her business was that it supplied cloth of not very good quality, which would affect the quality of our product and could bring disrepute to the business. This actually challenged one of my value ‘objectivity’.
For the benefit of our business, I was required to be objective and not let her gifts to cloud my judgment. This was in line with maintaining integrity since we had a customer base that trusted us and we were required to deal fairly with them. It required courage on my part to reject her offer but it was what I needed to do for the benefit of the business and its stakeholders. I am actually very content that I was able to stand firm and did not throw away my beliefs just for some material gains.
