Who is Farhan Lalji?

I’ve been interested in the concept of business ethics for a long time. The idea that business can operate in a “good” way versus operating in an “evil” way has been revolving in my head for sometime. With Google’s “Don’t be evil” internal motto, MSFT’s reputation as the “evil empire” and a bunch of the work by Umair, Fred, and other bloggers fuelling my thoughts, I’ve reached the conclusion that “good and evil” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame the question – at the end of the day all businesses are run by people and people don’t just fall into good and evil camps. I think it’s more about operating with the best interests of the customer versus the best interests of the bottom line.

I’m convinced that long term sustainable success is driven by being totally focused on what’s good for the customer, staff and the community, whereas short term unsustainable success is driven by making an extra dollar / pound / euro / franc / dirham / rupee etc.

The problem, I’ve found, is in large publicly traded companies there’s a responsibility to shareholders and showing that the business is operating with the best intentions for profitability but there’s no impetus to show that the business is delivering to the needs of all their other stakeholders – i.e. customers, staff, the community.

When I was in business school I wrote my dissertation on valuing the social and ethical return of business. Personally, I believe that businesses should be valued on a triple bottom line, how profitable they are, how sustainable/ethical they run their business, and the utility they provide customers. Only then do you get a true value of the company and its ability to be successful over the long term. Unfortunately there is no standard for such a valuation right now – there are way too many ideas for me to list on this blog post. There are so many different thoughts on how to value social returns that no one does it and so we all suffer.