“One man’s meal is another man’s poison.” Perhaps there is no better way to describe the dilemmas in dealing with diverse issues in international business. Increasingly in technology sector, along with the unprecedented speed of progress, modern technology innovations can reach beyond one country’s border instantly. Inevitably they become the disruptive forces that are marching into many uncharted territories including international and domestic laws, social norms and conventions, cultural and moral realms. Adding to the challenges, complex government and business relationships with globally entwined economic and political situations are real and present. Decisions, especially those touching on the “right or wrong” moral issues of public concerns, yet without adequate or accepted international laws or practices, are increasingly difficult for today’s business leaders.
Absolute moral compass in business does not exist. Without a workable compass or guiding principles, how can we claim that we are making sound business decisions with the right conscience?
Quoting moral sense in critical business decision-making is common. Google’s 2010 pulling its search business out of China was a well-known case of a decision by the sense of moral justice. It was made at the time Google still touted “Don’t be evil” as its corporate slogan. With the maturity of its profit-making business, the slogan is less mentioned as Google realized that it can be a huge liability to the company. The pursuit of profits itself can be viewed as evil by many world religions on moral grounds. The pervasive storing, tracking and mining user usage data on search and advertisements can also be said a questionable practice against uninformed individual’s privacy rights. It’s simply lopsided to justify as righteous or evil. In fact years later, when the number of internet users has grown from 30 million in 2000 to 2.75 billion in 2014 with half of that from China, it’s hard to imagine that Google never pondered back their past decision regarding the issue. As they expand globally and strive to push their internet services to every corner of the world, Google, the promoter of the ‘free internet’, unfortunately is increasingly frustrated with more governments’ controls and restrictions to its services. For example, they are facing even worse censorship in Russia today and just recently UK government delivered a ruling that UK citizens can demand the results of their name search be removed from Google’s search result list.
At the meantime, Microsoft is risking the “contempt of court” by refusing to surrender its user data stored in its Dublin Data Center to the Fed. The case is on its path to higher court after Microsoft’s initial appeal was turned down. From international users’ point of view, this is the right action to call for a better protection of user privacy in international business. Clearly if they did follow US government’s ruling, they could potentially lose all their valuable international cloud-service customers in the near future. Today there is definitely a tug of war going on for the technology industry on several related issues of significant importance and yet extreme trickiness, with not only international countries, but the US government as well.
There are universal moral values (honesty, fairness, respect of individual life, etc., to name a few) but no superior judgment on moral justice in international affairs. In practice, a little more humility and respect in international business has always been a more effective approach. That does not mean that we need comprise our long-held business ethics on professionalism and accountability, nor our key principles of enduring values. Today as a business leader, when facing a tough decision that one has to call out moral conscience for some guidance, perhaps we can start playing out the potential decision impacts on an enlarged space and time scale: not only for today’s limited users, but for the greater good of tomorrow’s extended audiences; not just for one region or country, but treat the world as a whole on this very much flattened globe; not just for the profits of a few earning seasons or tenure years, but consider the broader implications for many years to come; not through fixed lenses to view the present situations, but detect the positive changing trends to the future … The decision may be inevitably hard, but this frame and scale shifting may be one way to help mitigate some potential short-sightedness, narrow-mindedness, oversimplification or arrogance in our decision-making process to build a lasting global business presence.
Unfortunately on many tough issues, we may have to choose side despite the dilemmas and trickiness. In 1960s book of “Business Adventures” by John Brooks, considered a favorite business and management classics by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, which was re-printed this year, it documented that Joseph C. Wilson, the then CEO of Xerox, said in a 1964 speech, “The corporation cannot refuse to take a stand on public issues of major concern.” Apparently history can also provide some wise guidance.
