Good Ethics in Terms of the Needs of the Company - Term Paper Example

100 Day Plan of Action Introduction As ethics are understood by the company to be a compromise between following ethical guidelines and ensuring that the company does not place itself in a losing position, good ethics in terms of the needs of the company would mean that it follows principles that it is required to follow without leading itself into a loss. Understandably, we cannot expect the company to immediately close its operations in offshore locations where labor is being exploited and we cannot expect a radical change in the operations of the company to come overnight. However, there are a lot of things which the company can do in the next 100 days and a week by week breakdown is given in this action plan. The Action Plan The action plan is broken down into three sections. The first section deals with weeks 1-4 in which preliminary actions and grassroots level changes to the advertising, business processes and operations to the company are suggested. The second section covers week 5-8 and discusses the medium direction which the company needs to take with regard to ethics and finally, the last section deals with weeks 9-12 in which the company can firmly establish itself as an ethical company following all the rules of the game. Section 1 Week 1 In the first week the company needs to stop advertising the KillYerself line and the images associated with it since public reaction to deaths at home can be quite strong and ethical objections as well as the public backlash to the company can be very severe. As discussed by CNN (2007), such advertising can be harmful for the company as well as the image of the company which can make it lose its brand value and such would not be acceptable to Tightpenny. On the other hand, Leftbrain would certainly be happy with stopping these ads and focusing on the more positive aspects of fashion. The company should also start on a new fashion which encourages a positive lifestyle with a name such as +Living i.e. (positive living) to target ethical consumers (Ethical Consumer, 2006). Week 2 In this week, Leftbrain should sit down with advertising consultants and help in the creation of a new campaign in which he pushes the idea of Magma being an ethical company. The company can show how they plan to start offering business education scholarships to their workers in their so-called labour camps and swear shops and how the company is a caring company which does not do business with those who do not follow local labour laws and fair wage rules. At the same time, Tightpenny should seek out other companies in the same localities who can guarantee that they will treat labour as ethically as they have to in order to change their suppliers with the minimum of hassle and the least expenses involved. This would become Tightpenny’s continual effort throughout the coming weeks to update and secure the company’s supply chain with ethical suppliers and producers. Week 3 By this week, Magma should have new supply lines established for the worst offenders with regard to the exploted labour and should also have a new campaign for their ethical image. This is the time when they can focus on the third ethical issue of bribery in which they can utilize their links with the fashion world in order to encourage some designers to come forward and say that they like the relationship they have with several design houses. It does not have to be Magma alone since it is certain that other design houses are also using the techniques used by Magma. If fashion reporters can pick up on this news, it will essentially get an image of being more or less a standard practice in the fashion world. Therefore, even if the news breaks that Magma had paid design houses, it will also be reported that other companies did so as well. Week 4 In the fourth week, it is expected that the new advertising campaign would be ready and magma could even start advertising their new line i.e. +Living (positive living) in order to capture the market of the ethical consumer with the image of an ethical company pushing a positive lifestyle. On the corporate level, like GE (GE, 2006) and many others, Magma should start collecting data and information about their compliance with ethical regulations and note all the ethical achievements (if any) that they have had throughout their history. These would be required for them to launch their corporate ethics awareness drive which will come up in week 7. Section 2 Week 5 In the Fifth week, the company should be ready to have a limited launch of their +Living line of clothes and such steps would certainly generate some buzz about a company going out of its way to show that it is ethical indeed. In fact, some individuals may even begin to investigate into the company and even if some ill-founded information is discovered by them about the past of the company and even if there are questions about the company really being ethical or not, the executives and employees of the business should remain quiet and should ask the questioners to wait until the publication of the corporate ethics report. However, such a situation is rather unlikely to occur since the positive image and the advertising of ethical behaviour should win the company many friends even at the beginning of the campaign. Even then, the top executives of the company need to be briefed about the contents of the corporate ethics report and how they can answer difficult questions about ethics without giving a long and painful silence (Chwastiak & Young, 2003). Week 6 In this week, Tightpenny should have managed to take out all of the ethical offenders from Magma’s supply chain and should have also figured out if there locations where the same level of quality can be maintained while a reasonable level of ethics are maintained. If Tightpenny can also find these locations to be cheaper in terms of production costs, that would only be icing on the cake. However, even if the costs are comparative, it would be a job well done as long as the ethics are maintained. This is the week where the company can launch its month long ethics awareness drive and show how it has been treating its consumers as well as its suppliers ethically throughout its history. Week 7 In the second week of the ethics awareness drive, the company should present its ethical report to the public and even if there are some gaps in it, they can be glossed over in many cases (Adams, 2004). Of course, the hot topics in ethics need to be covered extensively and even minor things such as the replacement of office lights with energy saving and environmentally friendly lighting fixtures can be highlighted as a part of the company’s drive to help the environment. If that saves the company a ton of money in terms of energy costs in the long run, it will only make Tightpenny that much happier. Saving costs and ethics can go hand in hand if the company is particular about which causes it supports and what it seeks to save. Week 8 Here the company should focus on bringing some guest workers over from their factories and suppliers in other nations to show the press and the media how much they enjoy working for the company and how their lives have benefited from making a living wage. This is certainly a bold step in terms of marketing but it would silence once and for all anyone who says that Magma is in the business of exploiting its workers since the interpretations of these words can differ from person to person (Bryce, 2006). Week 9 In this week the ethically advertised and ethically created clothing line of +Living should be widely available and if everything has gone according to plan, Magma can have a success party in which it again reiterates its promise to remain ethical in a business which is marked with the idea of being unethical. Leftbrain can take centre stage and inform the world that their company does not do business with any supplier who exploits labor and can publicly show their supply chain which may even include a presentation concerning the working conditions of their suppliers that are much better than other producers in the same country. Since we know how Tightpenny tends to get drunk and say things he should not say, he is to be served nothing but orange juice all night. Leftbrain should be the one to handle all the questions and any smart comments from the news media should be referred to the lawyers of the company. Week 10 Any lose ends and ethical questions that remain to be answered can be handled in this week with press releases and information placed on the company website. If the company does find that there are issues that have not been solved and ethical problems that remain to be handled, instead of fighting them out it should show a hard resolve to solve these problems and give answers to their loyal customers (Smith, 2003). Even though the problem may be insolvable, as long as the company can show that it is doing its best; that is all it would take to handle these issues. Week 11 The company directors should sit down and review what changes have been made to the company processes in order to bring it more in line with the requirements of the brave new world where ethics are the king. This review process needs to be discussed with the public as well and the company should make it clear that it takes its ethical guidelines from its consumers as they are the company’s primary stakeholders (Cory, 2004). Again, as long as the company appears to listen to the requirements of the people with regard to ethics, it will certainly be fulfilling its promise. Week 12 The lessons learnt from the review process should be implemented in this week and admittedly, a hundred days are not enough to turn around the ethics of the company but at the very least, these hundred days would have prevented the company from going under if all the ethical questions had come up at once. Additionally, the company needs to move closer towards following real ethics than to just appear to be following ethics since the appearance may last a hundred or even two hundred days, it will not make the company last for many hundreds of years. Works Cited Adams, C. 2004, ‘The ethical, social and environmental reporting-portrayal gap’, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, vol. 17, no. 5, pp.731-757 Bryce, T. 2006, ‘Implementing Business Ethics’, [Online] Available at: http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/pm/irm/archives/implementing-business-ethics-8780 Chwastiak M. & Young J. 2003, ‘Silences in Annual Reports’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 533-552. CNN, 2007, ‘Anorexic fashion ad sparks debate’, [Online] Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/09/26/anorexia.model/index.html Cory, J. 2004, Business Ethics: The Ethical Revolution of Minority Shareholders, Springer. Ethical Consumer. 2006, ‘Why Buy Ethically?’, [Online] Available at: http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/aboutec/whybuyethically.htm Smith, S. 2003, ‘Developing and Implementing Ethics Values, Programs and Indentifying Ethical Conflicts’, [Online] Available at: http://www.nextlevel-consulting.com/articles/management/article01.html Read More