Eddie Cross's Website

Ethics in National Life

On Saturday I attended a meeting of our Church Men's Fellowship. We had a Professor talking to us about Ethics in Business. It was a real eye opener. I had always thought of ethics as being about honesty and integrity. His interpretation was that it was more about the fundamentals and is based on the original Greek term used by early Greek philosophizers. If you google the term they interpret it as representing fairness and equity in society.

Our speaker argued that this concept was contrary to both socialism and capitalism in the business world. What a great idea. Just imagine a world where we dealt with each other with fairness and equity. How powerful would that be.

In my own business life, I hope I have always treated all my employees with both fairness and equity. Fairness in that I have recognised the contribution of each and rewarded this with a fair level of remuneration and benefits. If you did apply such an understanding, we would not have many of the disputes that we have today between the people working in a given company or even at national level. What would fairness represent, not just salaries but also an understanding of what was needed to reward effort and contribution. Perhaps even what level of remuneration was required for the person to raise a family and live decently.

Equity is not so much that we treat everyone the same but that we give everyone a sense of worth and participation. We are a team, the CEO to the Cleaners at the office. If we applied both principles to all employees, just imagine what a transformation we would see. I am a keen student of airports as windows of the society in which they are located. I once visited Tanzania and found the airport filthy, dirty, toilets overflowing and stinking. The rest of the place was just as shambolic. It is very different now and this, more than democracy is a real measure of the state of the country.

I personally have witnessed how treating people equally, no matter what their status in society is, can be transformational. In my Head Office when I was CEO of a large organisation, I inherited a man who made coffee and tea for Head Office staff. He had been in this position for many years and did a reasonable job, but was almost invisible in the Office, just taken for granted. After six months I called him into my office and said I was going to fire him. He nearly collapsed.

I then told him he would self employed from then onwards, his small kitchen was refitted to his needs at our expense and he started to sell his service to the staff in the Office. In three months, he more than doubled his income and took on an assistant. The quality of service was transformed and grew into the supply of pastries and even meals. Everyone was talking about it. It cost us a bit, but visitors were impressed and I think productivity improved. For the person in question, he was no longer invisible but a real person who was appreciated.

Have you ever thought of what it means to treat everyone the same? Try it out and you will find it has impact. The greatest compliment I have ever been paid was from an executive who worked for me for 5 years and many years later said to me that they were the best years of his working life. Andre de Ryter who was CEO of Eskom in South Africa for 3 turbulent years, probably the toughest job in the country, talks about getting an email from a Junior School girl asking him for advice for a class project on renewable energy. He took the time to reply personally and years later the CEO of a major motor industry company remarked to him at a function, how that small gesture had impacted his daughters life.

The story of the life of Christ in the Bible, reveals a man who treated everyone with fairness and equity. Remember the prostitute who was going to be stoned to death and Jesus came to her rescue, asked those with stones if they were not also guilty of something, and when the crowd melted away, he spoke to her with quiet dignity and told her to go and 'sin no more'. Rich and poor, powerful Roman soldiers and Kings, Jesus treated them all as equals and of value. His selection of his disciples shows the same disregard for who they were, fine intellectuals, simple fishermen, shepherds and peasants. They changed the world and this continues even today.

When the Christian revivals swept across Europe, they transformed society. Even today you can see where the Reformation left its stamp on society and where it did not. Even the architecture is different. In Britain it was the changes wrought by the revivals that changed government and abolished slavery. Europe has forgotten its roots and abandoned its Christian foundations. The consequences are evident for all who choose to watch closely.

By contrast, naked capitalism with its power structures and outright campaign for supremacy and profit, may bring development and growth, but little else of real human value. My use of enterprise and incentive with the coffee maker, used these principles to improve service delivery but was also transformative and recognised his value as a person. Somehow, capitalism with a human face.

The drafters of the US Constitution were all Christians who had fled persecution in Europe. They crafted a set of rules that recognised than man is a fallen creature and could not be trusted with unfetted power. The separation of power and division of labour and accountability in that remarkable document remains as relevant today as it was centuries ago. Equity and fairness.

Then we had Communism, it is interesting that this ideology was born out of the idea that humanity would automatically evolve if society was constantly allowed to transform in the name of the greater good of society. Based on rejection that God even existed and built on the false belief that humanity was evolving into ever better forms, culminating in the perfect Communist society where everything would be equal. Communism created administrations whose abuse of human dignity became legendary.

Eventually it failed economically and was abandoned where ever it had taken root. Remnants remain but are no longer relevant or even influential. China is no longer a Communist country; its economy is probably more free market than many in the West. They have recognised the values that emerged in the Christian West - family, equity and fairness, but without the necessary understanding of what underpins these societal values.

Of course, there is much more to ethics than just fairness and equity. The CEO of a major Anglo American company here, became a Christian in his mid-40's and after some time he drew up a list of business practices that he felt were inconsistent with his new faith. He drew up a list and at the next Board meeting tabled these with proposals as to how the company should handle these issues in a manner consistent with his new values. The Board did not even allow him back to his office, he was escorted to the street and told to get a lawyer to deal with his severance package.

I have been told personally that there are certain jobs I could not handle because of my principles. They argue that unless you are willing to bribe someone or pay a 'facilitation fee' you cannot do business here. That may be true, but in the long term such practices are totally destructive in any society. If someone does something for you or your company, then in fairness you should consider remuneration but that is not the same as corruption in all its different forms.

Try it out, start dealing with everyone with equity and fairness and discover how it will transform your own life and your world.

Eddie Cross
Harare, 15th August 2023