Random Stuff On Business Ethics (And Competitive Intelligence)

Some good comments over at my BusinessWeek blog post on "Teaching Ethics In the Business Schools:What Do You Think?". Kathleen also has a post that touches on leadership and ethics here.

When contemplating what my life would be like if I were a full-time competitive intelligence person (as opposed to doing competitive intelligence as part of general startup efforts or management consulting), I found the following PDF (from Competitive Intelligence Review) to be excellent on highlighting some concrete cases of how competitive intelligence can walk a fine line with ethical behavior. Here’s a snip from early on in the article that demonstrates a situation with Marriott:

For example, a 1988 Fortune magazine article outlined Marriott’s practice of using headhunters to interview regional managers from each of five competitors’ economy hotel chains when it was investigating that market. Marriott was able to obtain information regarding salaries, training, and managerial expectations. Some people may view such tactics as unethical. Marriott maintained that they were ethically acceptable because job candidates were told no jobs were currently available, but might be available in the future, and because several of the interviewees were later hired (Dumaine, 1988).

Not making any judgements here, I also have an interesting article that my wife uses in marketing class that outlines how ex-law enforcement agents are used by a company to survey the frozen pizza production capacity of one of the major pizza players and how that intelligence, while it clearly uses deception on the ground floor by the intelligence person, it enabled the vendor to become the #2 player in the market. Company gone bad? Agents gone bad? Or in the spirit of winning the game? Seems like the original PDF I pointed out (did I say it was a good paper?) can help one to decide (and also get a perspective on how one’s opinion may fit within a cross-section of other professionals).