Business Policy and Strategy

The Real Business of Real Business Corporate trust and integrity

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The title of this book requires some explanation. It is a heavily revised edition of a book entitled Integrity in Organizations: An Alternative Business Ethic, published by McGraw-Hill in 1995. The focus of the text has not changed; it remains oriented to the business practitioner’s perspective and is written specifically for students of management. What has changed is the depth of understanding of the business context and the extent to which the dominant economic orthodoxy is in collision with the many and various imperatives of a fragile and barely sustainable world1. Hence this revised text and new title requiring explanation.
The sub-title, Corporate Trust and Integrity, is probably clear enough. In this ever increasingly interdependent globalised world, it is vital for organisations that they are welcomed into the myriad of mutually beneficial interactions. To achieve this they need to be trusted. The only exception to that is if the organisation has become so powerful that interaction with it is unavoidable. Even then, if the powerful organisation is not trusted, one way or another, it will pay for that lack of trust. In the end, its power, even its autonomy, may be threatened. So trust is crucial to the long term success of any organisation and businesses are no exception. So the question is how do companies ensure they are trusted? The answer is to ensure they always behave with integrity. That is to make absolutely certain they are trustworthy. Clever PR and promotion are irrelevant. Unless an organisation behaves with integrity it will not be trusted. So that is what the subtitle is about.
The Real Business of Real Business warrants a bit more explanation. Let’s take the second Real Business first. Governments often talk about how important it is to be business friendly, completely failing to recognise that business is not a single coherent entity. There are start-ups, fast growing hi-tec businesses, mature low-tec plodders and businesses which appear to be in terminal decline. They all have different objectives and different needs. Even more important, today there are businesses which operate in the traditional frame, producing goods and services which the general population need or want. These are the producers. There are also other businesses whose role used to be to provide the financial support needed by the producers in order to invest sufficiently in R&D, production facilities, people development and working capital. However, over the past few decades, a large proportion of these financial businesses have changed their effective roles so that rather than supporting the financial needs of the producers, they are extracting value from them. So the second Real Business in the title makes the distinction between the producers of goods and services and these ambiguous financial businesses. The second Real Business refers to the producers.

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English

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978-87-403-1133-4

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