Have a beautiful Friday. Today I am posting the nineteenth (XIX) episode of this saga. Sagas or adventure epics are a work in progress (WIP). A saga is composed of a series of happenings, a storyline of different consecutive episodes, that can´t be understood unless you have the patience to stay with the author or producer for the whole amount of chronological chapters. These sections or episodes only have sense once the saga is finished or completed. “On eagles wings: our recovery from Coronavirus” is still a WIP saga. Any epic comes from books, which then later inspire others to change. My aim with “On eagles wings: Our recovery from Coronavirus” is a series of readings that you must keep an eye to from beginning to end, otherwise, you won´t grasp the meaning of my message.

“Tuga Tortuga”. Better slowly than destroying ourselves. A handmade aquarelle by Eleonora Escalante. Painted with love on Fabriano 5 paper. Size: 7 inches x 5 inches.

Yesterday I started to explain the theories behind ethical reasoning. Any excellent ethicist will spend at least a year explaining them. I can´t extend in detail what is the basis for making ethical decisions, but I have to cover at least the basics of this material because the recovery from such a behemoth pandemic must help us to fix and recover our societies operational ways. Before the Coronavirus, we were heading towards the mistaken direction with our economics, and we need to open our eyes, in order to change for the better, to evolve for a balanced and equilibrated civilization. Otherwise, we will destroy the future of the next generation or we may trigger a weird new economic world order that will kill the good things of the capitalism. Because the capitalism has plenty of benefits too, despite its problems. Like everything in life, our economic capitalist model needs to evolve, and that means the need to repair what is not right.

Gifted. Trust me, I was not thinking to write about the ethical reasonings the way I did it yesterday. I was simply planning to offer you a code of ethics material (why to do it, how to do it, and how to apply it). And that was my original program. Point. But last Friday night,  I saw the movie “Gifted”, and one of the protagonist scenes pushed me to have the valiant  “guts” to write as I did it yesterday.

Nobody likes a smart-ass. As in the “Gifted” movie scene, the little girl initially was considered a “simple-minded dull”, because she did not address nor speak that the math test problem written by the MIT Professor was wrong. On the way out of MIT, she told her thoughts to her grandmother who took her back to the classroom. Then she fixed the problem statement, and it was simple, a piece of cake for her to solve it.  Once she finished it, the MIT professor asked her why she did not say anything to him in the first place? And she replies that she was not supposed to correct older people. “Nobody likes a smart-ass”.

Business scholars of prestigious and long dedication who have taught business and corporate strategy at Harvard, Wharton (UPenn), Stern (NYU), IESE, Stanford, London Business School, or Cornell University or any well-known university can reassure you that I am not a communist. I can´t. I adore the possibilities of “good” business societies in which humans are dignified by their works and mastering skills for what they can or potentially can do. The “bottom line” issue is that capitalism has not been able to rectify itself (in its philosophy) to evolve for the better. Communism was worst than capitalism when it comes to ethics, otherwise, it wouldn´t have sunk as it happened some decades ago.

What I am trying to do is to provide a correction, a new concept for our recovery. What I am trying to do is to provide a new framework of business based on ethical values. We must review and correct or adjust the premises for a new capitalism, a new economic system that can fix the lack of ethics of the previous century of actions which have triggered not just management scandals like Enron, or Lehman bankruptcy, or the recently Odebrecht projects in its Latinamerica´s network of companies. Each company which has been involved in ethical opprobrium of different nature (such as Iberdrola with a spy scandal, or Bernard Madoff Investment Securities with his Ponzi schemes, or Petrobras corruption or many international banks which have made up their financial results) are other cases of the lack of ethics in business and corporate strategy models for decision making.    There are thousands of companies and projects which have followed selfish excessive individualism (the wrong kind of utilitarianism-egoism that I don´t agree with).

Stay with me all the way in this journey. Given my latter explanation, I just request you to wait before proceeding to judge the content of these episodes. I still have a lot to share. As I told you, my plan was to show you how to do codes of ethics this week, but then I found out that I have never visited the material of ethical reasoning theories, so I had to cover these theories first. Any ethical code reflects a set of ethical values and ethical reasoning, in consequence, we are obliged to visit the method of ethical justification and decision making when applying the codes of ethics. As I told you yesterday, codes of ethics are not a painting to hang out on a wall. Codes of ethics are like the core of your business, your organization. These are your guideline for decision making, and consistently, it is important to notice how different are the ethical reasoning approaches. Yesterday, we already explained the consequentialist (utilitarianism); the Kantian deontologism (based on duties, rights, and obligations); and the third one, is the human nature values approach (which I will explain next week).

These three ethical reasonings may overlap. They can complement each other. These have evolved from a purist form to a melange or mix of them in our contemporary times in many societies. And eureka! economists have done their models by using these theories.

“Maximizing Shareholder Value” needs to be fixed to “Creating Integral Value”. Finally, please when I say that the premise of “maximizing shareholder value” can´t continue to be the “only” factor that leads the capitalist strategy frameworks of analysis, I write it knowing that there is “light”, an evolution of that premise to a better integral one. I am not even considering socialism-communist ideas, not at all. What I am trying to say, firmly and in one phrase is that if the capitalism doesn´t evolve to become “ethical integral capitalism”, this economic model will perish sooner or later, either by a revolution of souls which will arise with rage and anger, or it will be dismissed in this century or in the next ones, by a climate change event of gigantic proportions. If we don´t repair the excessive greed of capitalism, it is inevitably going to be destroyed by others who are against it, particularly in times of chaos…  And if you are not open enough to understand me, be sure that superior anarchy and disorder will happen using the current and future disruptive technologies. C‘est que tu me comprends s’il te plait?

Take my hand during this journey, just wait. Take it easy. Read my next episodes, all will make sense for you.

Blessings have a beautiful weekend.

Carefully and discreetly, eagles walk with meticulous attention too.

Published by eleonoraescalantestrategy

Corporate Strategy Artist, San Salvador, El Salvador View all posts by eleonoraescalantestrategy