Ethics is a code that a company or individual lives by.  It is a moral compass, or like in Pinocchio, our Jiminy Cricket.

Most times we know the right thing to do, but we are tripped up by those pesky gray areas.  That’s why I enjoy being around young teens.  They see the world in black and white and they have very few gray areas. 

This is how navigation through the gray areas happens.

I know the right thing to do, but if I do it, this job will lose money. 

I have a responsibility to shareholders.

I probably won’t get caught. 

Everybody else is doing it. 

I’ll take this shortcut just this one time.

Lately, there has been a lot of news where companies and people have messed up by doing the wrong thing.

BP, Jesse James and Tiger Woods come to mind.  I bet the head of BP, Tony Hayward would like to go to rehab for 30 days right about now.  Some sort of inhouse program for people who make bad decisions in industry  (along with Bernie Madoff and Enron execs).

Do you always follow safety rules or sometimes  skip safety when the job’s so small that it takes longer to set up safely than to actually do the work? 

If you are responsible for worker safety do you always do the right thing?

When we start chipping away at our values—looking the other way when it comes to safety, it’s easy to put them away when they get in the way and pull them out when someone is looking. 

I want to be the kind of person that always has the same values and morals—not just when the cameras rolling.