Leadership

In War, Is Business Just Business?

Sept. 16, 2014

Here are the basic questions management needs to be asking and answering.

Is war just? Can war be justified? Does justification make war right?

These are not academic questions. You need only to glance at an e-tablet screen, or a computer monitor, or HDTV, or listen for a moment to a radio to know that in 2014 war is a 24/7 reality. In Ukraine. In Syria. In Iraq. Between Israel and Hamas. In such African states as Nigeria, Congo, and Somalia.

War kills. War maims. War can sometimes shorten conflicts and lead to peace. Wars can fail totally.

War, in every instance, affects the ways companies in the United States and across the rest of the world conduct business.

I do not propose to provide you with a protocol to distinguish between good wars and bad wars, or with a checklist by which to judge any war, however it’s justified.

Rather, I ask you—urge you—as leaders in industry—to begin with my three initial questions about war. To think seriously about these questions and about larger issues of business ethics. And then to make informed moral operating judgments.

You won’t be the first person to confront questions about the moral conduct of business. By one estimate, that may have happened as many as 3,700 years ago. Nor will you be the last person to inquire into moral principles of business conduct. Many of your colleagues are doing that this very day, as political, economic, and religious events over which they have no direct control in places that are culturally foreign challenge their companies’ policies and practices.

...do corporate executives have a responsibility to take moral sides in the conflicts in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, and in Africa?

If I believed that business and ethics were mutually exclusive words, I could end this essay right now, and you could go on to some other activity. But I don’t believe that they are mutually exclusive, and I hope you will continue to read.

To what extent, then, are business and ethics mutually inclusive terms—or should be mutually inclusive terms? Is it enough that financial statements conform to widely recognized and accepted accounting standards? Is it enough that a company’s business practices are within the law in the United States and elsewhere? Even if a company’s management believes some of the laws, domestic and foreign, are misguided, just plain wrong, or counter to its notion of fair competition?

For executives in public corporations and privately-held companies, these are basic questions—in their own ways as basic as “Why are we in business?” But beyond fiduciary and legal requirements, do corporations, companies, and business partnerships have social responsibilities? That question, too, is—or should be—a basic question. Does a company have a responsibility to be a moral force, a moral leader, a moral teacher? To whom? For whom? In what context?

At the present moment do corporate executives have a responsibility to take moral sides in the conflicts in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, and in Africa? Should their companies participate commercially in good wars and not in those that are bad? Or in any war?

Please take more than a moment to consider these questions.

This is another of a series of occasional essay by John S. McClenahen, an award-winning writer and photographer who retired from IndustryWeek as a senior editor in 2006.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.