Justice Justice will be pursued, in business and in general./Pexels.com
If you are unethical, you risk everything collapsing on you like a house of cards, and it will probably come to you.
Take for example the Sackler family and their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, which has become the focus of public criticism for its contribution to the opioid crisis.
They were sued due to the misleading advertising surrounding the drug OxyContin, which caused the poor patients to become addicted to opioids and created a veritable epidemic in the US. Along with the social responsibility and the unforgivable damage caused to the American and global public, these actions also caused enormous damage on the business side when they completely crushed the company's image and the public's trust Beh. Credibility and image are important for any company, but their importance intensifies even more when it comes to a pharmaceutical manufacturer. Even the series "Empire of Pain", which unfolds the story of the family, did not receive favorable reviews.
Another example of bad ethics leading to colossal business failure is the never-ending saga of Elon Musk and Twitter.
Musk only came to Twitter because of bad ethics.
He announced that he would buy the company at an exorbitant price, retracted it, and was forced to purchase the chain anyway because his tweets and capricious behavior caused challenges in the stability of its shares.
Under his management, a number of controversial moves were implemented.
Among other things, Musk brought back to Twitter toxic, anti-Semitic, misogynist accounts, and a host of other "stars" from humanity's petri dish.
This move not only drove away many users but also all major advertisers, leading to huge losses, because no serious company would want their ad to appear above a tweet by a neo-Nazi scumbag like Nick Fuentes.
Another example of the broken ethics that characterizes Twitter during the Musk era is the Blue Hoy affair, in which Twitter began to demand payment for verifying accounts, which created a wave of predictions and undermined the trust of netizens.
All of these, along with other moves such as limiting the amount of tweets that surfers can read per day, are what led, among other things, to a drop of over 70% in Twitter's value since it was purchased by Musk.
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Not only for reasons of conscience: the economic motivations of ethics in business
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Studies show that companies committed to ethics enjoy economic and image benefits.
Compliance with social responsibility and ethics can lead to more loyal customers, a positive reputation, as well as financial stability in the long term.
Also, ethics prevents moral and legal entanglements.
The stories of the Sackler family and Twitter demonstrate how a lack of ethics can lead to image and legal crises.
And if you think to yourself, the biggest companies in the world like Apple and Facebook are not ethical at all.
Well, pay attention to the process that has been taking place in recent years: the consumer, and especially the younger generation, emphasize values such as sustainability and fair employment conditions, and give priority to companies that meet these standards.
Even Apple got into trouble recently when it was banned from selling some of its smartwatch models because it lost a lawsuit involving one of the watch's patents.
And in general, although the big corporations don't play fair, ethics still creates boundaries for them, and when they go beyond them, it issues them a red card.
Ask the Sackler family, Harvey Weinstein (MeToo is a powerful example of the increasing importance of ethics), or crypto scam artist Sam Bankman Fried.
Image damage: easy to destroy, hard to fix
If in business the profit line is also important, then in organizations ethics becomes even more important.
The "All" association suffered a great deal of damage when it became clear that one of its directors had sexually harassed the activity, and also on the political level the Labor Party is still paying the price of Mapai's unethical conduct towards anyone who did not have a red book.
Even at the budgetary level, organizations live Many times from donations, and an organization that is exposed as corrupt or unethical, will of course experience not only the satisfaction of the justice system, but is also expected to stop receiving support from donors.
This is true even at the political level
Ask the Palestinian Authority, which in May 2023 was informed by the European Union that it was freezing the amounts of aid it planned to transfer to finance its education system, due to the wild incitement in the Palestinian curricula, or UNRWA, the United Nations aid organization for Palestinian refugees, which several countries announced The end of support for him in view of the evidence of the participation of the members of the organization in the abominable massacre of 7/10.
And when we talk about ethics, it is impossible not to talk about the event that gathers within it a flood of dilemmas and ethical questions - war. The current war is indeed a war of defense that broke out after a terrible massacre that Hamas carried out among our people , but the circumstances of the outbreak of war do not eliminate all the dilemmas that war raises, especially one where the battle takes place in population centers.
Besides the desire to be moral, the IDF's adherence to the international rules of war, which are actually rules that try to maintain a certain level of ethics during war, is essential. It allows us to continue cooperation with our important allies and first and foremost - the US.
I will not enter into a discussion of how committed we should be to any international demand when it challenges our security goals, but I would like to emphasize an important point: in the modern era, a Western country that is not a superpower (in fact, any Western country that is not the US) will have a very difficult time winning wars without taking into account the international rules of warfare.
Think before you act
Ethics is not just "doing the right thing" but a real necessity in the long-term strategic construction of a company, organization and even political bodies.
This is a field that has many nuances and not one that is defined by 1 or 0. This can be compared to a football game: not every little push or trash talk will receive a response, but a blatant deviation from the ethical boundaries of the game such as a brutal foul, preventing a goal, certainly illegally, etc. ', will lead the referee to issue a red card, which will remove the player from the game.
Similarly, as the boundaries of ethics tighten around public and commercial entities, for example when the public expresses interest and preference for environmentally friendly products, the commitment of those entities to understand and act within those boundaries tightens and becomes an essential element for their continuity.
Ofer Nidam is an entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Dasmit and an aerodynamics engineer.
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