Greed has been a hot topic in recent years, such as in the financial industry where five of the worlds biggest banks are felons. These companies include JPMorgan, Chase, Citicorp, Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS AG. It is astounding to imagine companies of such large magnitude falling prey to greed. These companies had short circuiting in their ethics. These companies had underlying systematic problems in their organization to let these events happen.

In an article on Talking Ethics, they report the key points from a survey of finance industry professionals released Tuesday by The University of Notre Dame and Labaton Sucharow LLP makes for depressing reading.

• 47% believe their competitors engaged in unethical or illegal activity in order to gain an edge in the market, up from 39% in a similar 2012 survey.
• More than one-third (34%) of those earning $500,000 or more annually have witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.

These are two key points from that survey the article goes on to more, but these two speak volumes on their own. 47% believe unethical behavior is a huge statistic along with one third witnessing wrongdoing in the workplace. The time to change this is now.

As entrepreneurs, we set the foundation of our companies, we set the guidelines that the companies will follow. Our companies need to be instilled with values and morels, these combined will enable future employees to look back and learn how to handle situations based on the past. Future employees need these values and morels as a campus to guide them.

On the other side of the coin, companies need to make a profit. An article on Website Magazine says, “At the end of the day, companies must make money or they will have to close their operations.” Companies need profits to survive and make the investments involved with the company pay off. But there should be an ethical limit to how much profit a company can make, or should there. In my  next article we will delve deeper into this concept.

For now thanks for reading as always comment, tell me what you think and share to all.

Photo By Liz West Via. Flickr