If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion.¹

A friend who owns a small cabling business once told me that no matter how concerned a business-owner is about the welfare of their clients, some decisions that the business-owner makes are more in the best interest of the business rather than the client.

This is an undeniable fact that I agree with. These business decisions all end up impacting the bottom line, or profit, of the business. They range from things like using cheap materials to save on expenses, to unnecessary value-added goods or services, to pure and outright negligence.

Examples from around me? I’ve posted about some of them before, but read through the following groups and see if you can figure out the “ethical” difference of the examples in each group. I haven’t made up any of the examples:

Two examples of how to reduce expenses from a material/supply perspective:

1. On a day tour of cenotes (underground caves) in Mexico we arrived and set up to repel into the largest one of the day. The ladder via which our rope and harness was attached to (about 150 feet above the water at the bottom of the cave) was craftily and skillfully, rung by rung, taped together with duct tape.
2. How about the dentist that I know who orders one colour of white material for fillings. Every one of his patients who gets a white filling gets the same color of white. Not only that, but the excess filling material that is dispensed and doesn’t get used on your tooth, gets used in the next patient’s new filling.

Two examples of how to improve income by value-added services:

1. You decide that you want to learn to waltz. You take a few lessons at a ballroom dance studio. You are then strongly encouraged by the studio owner to pick up a multitude of other dances and a schedule of lessons because these dances will allow you not only to dance to other types of music, but will also indirectly give you training in frame, lead and follow, and floorcraft for the waltz.
2. Your dog while illegally out for a walk with you off his leash, attacks a neighbour’s (who is a friend) dog who is on a leash. The scuffle seems to end uneventfully. The next day the neighbour shows up and says his dog’s eye is swollen shut. You take their dog to a neighbourhood vet who runs a run-down walk-in clinic but is the only one available at that time to see the emergency. Antibiotic eye drops are prescribed along with a return visit in a week. The return visit is “free”. Uh huh. Within the week, the swollen upper eyelid looks almost as good as new. There is a little scar where the injury was, but that will probably continue to improve over time. We take the dog back to the vet for his free recheck. Although the visit is free, the value-added service is another prescription and dispensation of antibiotics for the scar, “just in case.” Antibiotic use for “just in case” is generally frowned upon these days.

Two examples of negligence:

1. In the practice of endodontics, controversy exists between the need for two visits to treat infected teeth, versus one visit. There is research evidence supportive of both sides of the debate. You choose to ignore the evidence supportive of two-visit treatment, treat everything in a single appointment, and present only the research supportive of single-visit treatment as your justification. There is a higher profit margin when teeth are treated in a single visit.
2. You don’t like doing root canals, your patients have a difficult time during the procedure, your patients return again and again after the procedure complaining of persistent symptoms, yet you continue to do root canal therapy as you always have, with no effort to improve your skills or understanding of the process. But…when your wife or kid needs a root canal, they are referred to me, the specialist.

Without turning this post into an ethics course, I think that most of you will agree that the number 1′s are less of a problem along the do-good/do-bad scale than the number 2′s. This probably is because the number 2′s are more fraudulent — they represent actions and situations where either a collective standard of treatment or practice is not upheld, or an outright deception is represented. There is a feeling that you’ve been robbed.

As a professional in business, the imperative to work ethically is a daily challenge for me. I have made good and bad business decisions that have directly involved patients.

So how do I make a split-second decision when deciding on the “right” thing to do? After reading through all of this, you might be surprised to find that the answer is very simple. The answer is the way that I live life daily. It is the Ethic of Reciprocity, or the Golden Rule. But I go one step further. I don’t treat you as I would want to be treated, myself. I treat you as I would want my brother, my mother, or my wife to be treated.

1. Dalai Lama [↩]