Enron, Worldcom, Martha Stewart — all are associated with ethical scandals in the past few years. Actually, the number of compa­nies and individuals that have ethical clouds over them could be multiplied well beyond those whose names have been prominent in the news. There is a widespread sense in the general public that the business community has lost its moral compass and that greed is the overriding principle governing how business is done. “Business ethics” is widely considered an oxymoron.

But the excesses and scandals of the past few years have also spurred business to realise that ethics does matter and doing business in the right way morally makes a difference. In a special issue of Business Week, devoted to “25 Ideas for the Post-Enron Setting”, at the top of the list of these ideas was the idea of integrity. As they put it, “Trust, fairness and integrity matter, and they matter to the bottom line.”

What ethical challenges do you face in your workplace? What temptations exist to compromise your Christian world­view? What strategies do you have for navigating the rough ethical waters in your company?

One common strategy for dealing with ethical challenges in the workplace is to create two separate worlds that you operate in — your life in the workplace and your private life. Each sphere then has its own set of rules and guidelines that you follow. That is, you have one set of moral rules for the workplace, and a dif­ferent, and presumably higher, set of rules for your private life. You realise that the workplace is a very competitive place that requires you to set aside some of your Christian virtues, such as love, compas­sion and sometimes, even fairness. You insist that those values are fine for private life, but the environment of business is such that you must play by a different set of rules in order to succeed.

You see colleagues of yours who claim to be Christians, but who are involved in some very questionable business practices and you admit that this way of compart­mentalising your life is maybe not that unusual. Perhaps a lot of people accept what Albert Carr wrote years ago that “a sudden submission to Christian ethics would produce the greatest economic upheaval in history”. What he meant by that is that if a person practised Christian ethics consistently in the workplace, he or she would not be competitive.

Or take the statement by Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, who claimed to be a Christian, who said “My priorities are God first, family second and McDonald’s hamburgers third. And when I go to work on Monday morn­ing, that order reverses.” What he meant by that is that he had two sets of priorities, one for the workplace and the other for pri­vate life, and a corresponding set of rules for each.

From a Christian worldview, compart­mentalising your life is full of difficulties. The Bible is very clear that we are to live all our lives under the Lordship of Christ. He is the boss over every aspect of our lives. No part of our lives is to be exempt from His scrutiny and direction. Following Christ is not something that we reserve for the weekend — it is a full-time vocation.

Hidden in the statements of Ray Kroc and Albert Carr is the assumption that having integrity in the workplace is not good business, that is, it is costly to one’s bottom-line. But most people have the intuitive sense that that’s not true, that doing the right thing in the workplace will pay off somehow.

From a Christian worldview, good ethics is always good business. This is because from God’s perspective, what constitutes good business is much broader than a company’s bottom-line. Good business from a biblical perspective includes how you do business. The com­pany that makes a lot of money using immoral means or providing an immoral product/service would be viewed by God as a failure, regardless of the profitability of the company. We should also realise that just because a company or an individ­ual has strong ethics does not necessarily mean that they will be profitable. They could have integrity but be incompetent in running a business or have a lousy product or service.

In the short term, good ethics is usually costly. If it were not, everyone would do the right thing! The Bible is full of ref­erences to the prosperity of the wicked. The Psalmists regularly lament that the wicked are profitable (Psalm 73:1-9). Some of the most profitable industries today are those which we would classify as “wickedness”, such as pornography and the illegal drug trade. It is also true that the righteous man prospers too (Prov. 13:21), but in the Bible, there is no neces­sary connection between righteousness and prosperity.

In the long run, however, integrity usu­ally pays off. Here’s why: integrity builds trust, and trustworthiness is a critical component in building a successful busi­ness over time. People will generally go out of their way and sometimes even pay higher prices to do business with people they trust. And more importantly, they will take pains to avoid doing business with people they don’t trust.

One of the great myths of the business world is that greed is the engine of our economic system. Adam Smith, the ideo­logical founder of capitalism, never said the phrase that is often attributed to him that “greed is good”. He held that enlight­ened self-interest is the engine of capital­ism, and that the free market would never work unless the individual participants had the moral values necessary to restrain their self-interest. For Smith, those came from Judeo-Christian morality. Greed run amok will alienate most of the parties that are necessary to build a lasting busi­ness, such as suppliers, employees, cus­tomers and partners.

The reality is that trust is the engine of our economic system. Without trust, business relationships don’t happen and the costs of doing business increase astronomical. Think about all the transactions that take place every day that are premised on trust. Literally millions of them occur daily! Every time someone buys something on credit, trust is assumed. Every time you go to work, you are trusting that you will get paid on payday. The reason that e-commerce has taken off in the past few years is that more people trust that their personal and financial information will not be misused.

Think about how expensive it is to do business in cultures where interpersonal trust is low. It is not an accident that countries and cultures where this is the case have great difficulty attracting investment.

I got a vivid lesson in this when I met Tedla. He was one of my graduate stu­dents in philosophy who came to Talbot School of Theology from Ethiopia. A few days after he arrived on campus, I had the opportunity to take him out to lunch. We went to a local popular restaurant down the street from the school and had a delightful time getting to know each other better. When it came time to pay for the meal, I handed our server my credit card. Tedla had never seen a credit card before, and was unfamiliar with paying for goods or services on credit. When the server brought the bill back, I signed it and we got up to leave. I’m not sure Tedla quite understood that I had just paid for the meal.

He explained to me that in his country, this was very rare. In fact, he told me that sometimes buyers and sellers of a com­modity have a routine in which the buyer holds onto the money and the seller holds onto the product and they both release their grip at the same time, thereby making the exchange. I used the occasion as a “teachable moment” and said that the restaurant trusts that my credit card company will pay the bill. Further, my credit card company trusts that I will pay my bill when it comes in the mail. Of course, if I don’t pay the bill, they won’t extend me credit any longer. But that transaction in the restaurant was premised on trust, and without it, a good deal of the business that is transacted every day either would not happen, or would be more costly and cumbersome to transact.

Good business actually requires not just trust, but some other important virtues. Hard work, diligence, thrift, ini­tiative, creativity, promise-keeping, and truthfulness are just a few other virtues that are at the root of successful individ­uals and companies. Business actually encourages these virtues, and for long run success, they are generally consid­ered very helpful character traits for which employers are always on the look­out.

Of course, the converse is also true. Business can encourage greed too. In fact, the prospect of enormous pay­offs in the past few years has made the temptation to cut corners ethically very difficult to resist. But people who act unethically usually have difficulty stay­ing in business and prospering in the long run. The temptation is to get in, make your money however you can, and then get out.

In the past decade in the dot.com boom, this pattern was something to which people aspired. It’s perhaps not an accident that the vast majority of those companies are no longer in business today. Such a short-term outlook, look­ing for a quick gain without much con­sideration for the long run creation of value, turned out to be a very costly way of seeing the world.