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This was a year to remember - but not to repeat!
By Lauren | December 30, 2009
Time recently dubbed 2000-2009 as “The Decade from Hell.” That may be a little extreme, but 2009 was certainly a year we wouldn’t want to do over any time soon.
This was the year of a lingering recession caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown on Wall Street. (Some economists say the recession is ending with a “jobless recovery,” but how can anyone say we’ve “recovered” when people still haven’t been able to go back to work?) It was the year that Bernie Madoff proved the SEC to have been utterly ineffective in protecting investors from losing millions of dollars over decades of fraud. It was the year when home foreclosures hit record levels, housing prices continued to fall, and the construction industry remained in a slump. And it was the year that American taxpayers forked over billions of bailout dollars to banks, only to watch those banks scramble to return the money so they could continue paying their top executives lavish salaries while withholding credit from small businesses and hitting their customers with fee upon fee upon fee.
2010 begins not only a new year, but a new decade and a new opportunity to do things differently. Much of what made 2009 such a bad year were the consequences of a profit-at-any-price, me-first mindset on the part of businesses, and a my-constituents-and-fundraising-base-first attitude on the part of legislators. (We’ll save the SEC for another day.) The biggest lesson to be learned from the hardships of 2009 is that bad business ethics cause real human pain. The best New Year’s resolution that businesses can make for 2010 is to voluntarily improve their ethics, putting customers’ interests before short-term profit. Legislators, meanwhile, would do well to focus more on the greater good and less on the special interests of their top financial contributors. Better ethics in 2010 will certainly give us a better year.
Topics: Business Ethics, Professional Ethics, Social Ethics, business communications, corporate responsibility, customer relations, ethics |