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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

July - 2012 - issue > In My Opinion

Business is a strange Animal

Sunil Dutt
Managing Director-RIM-India
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Sunil Dutt
RIM was incorporated on March 7th, 1984. It is a designer, manufacturer and marketer for wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Research In Motion is the company behind the award winning BlackBerry product line. BlackBerry family includes smartphones and software offerings with BlackBerry Playbook

Across the world, businessmen begin with what is largely good intent: to give the world what it needs, to help improve the way we live and make the world a better place. Laws, regulations and statute come into play when business is set up -- to ensure that the world continues to be a safe and sane place to live in. However, despite law, legislation and growing regulation, responsible businesses today feel the need to revisit their values, principles, ethical codes, and raise the bar on their business integrity standards. I am reminded of Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathway, who famously said, "In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you."

An urgent need for business integrity is being felt across the world. The indictors for this are all around us. As of 1999, 40 corporations in the Fortune 100 had behaved in ways considered unethical, according to writer and researcher Ronald Clement in the Harvard Business Review. The unethical behavior included fraud, discriminatory practices, undisclosed executive pay, antitrust activities, patent infringement, and other violations of the law. And this is from the A-List of Corporate America. Today, just a decade later, the situation is much worse. Corporate integrity breaches have shaken up entire economies. Who can forget that the Lehman Brothers played a major role in the global financial crises that we are still recovering from?

There has been no other time when so many forms of misconduct have occurred across industries. If we examine only India, we have never had so many businessmen and "others" in jail or under legal scrutiny because of financial misconduct. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs of the Government of India is trying to collate data on companies, intermediaries and individuals who have been indicted for economic fraud or non-compliance to law in a bid to warn investors. It’s an uphill task, but as of May 2012, the ministry had listed 1, 05, 251 unique companies and firms that were under a cloud. There are many more such organizations that the ministry has been unable to track and list. But, if you do the math, using a general guess that on average each of those companies listed by the ministry must be worth around Rs 200 crores with about 1,000 to 1,500 employees each, you know the enormous amount of money and the huge number of jobs that are at risk.

We need to look no further to validate the need for business integrity: it is a way of ensuring sustainable businesses, creating work environments that securitize the carefully-built careers of employees, reducing the legal costs of doing business, preventing brand erosion and to my mind, ensuring that investors bring their money to organizations that clearly demonstrate they can safeguard investor wealth. For us in India, it is a way of ensuring that the international investment community is even more eager to be part of the India growth story. In fact the stated mission of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in publishing the names of entities that are under the scanner is to "prevent unscrupulous entities/ individuals from harming investors and, thereby help build public confidence in the financial system enabling greater flow of public investment to the right avenues." The goal is to be lauded.


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Reader's comments(1)
1:its nice articles as definding business is strange animal well you can find more business at www.apdtrade.com and grow your business easily.
Posted by: Jitendra Kumar - 17th Jul 2012
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