Cultural Values and Personal Ethics Paper

Cultural Values and Personal Ethics Paper

In this assignment I will discuss how personal, organizational, and cultural values affect decision making: in my personal and professional life. I have chosen a format that will break this paper into two sections, personal and professional decisions, and how they affected me.

To quote CEO Mr. John Chambers from the Cisco.com website:

Discussions of integrity have become increasingly important in today's business environment. But these discussions are not new to CiscoÐ'-ethics, most especially integrityÐ'-have always been a significant part of both our culture and the way we conduct business. Operating with a strong sense of integrity is critical to maintaining trust and credibility with our customers, partners, employees, and shareholders.

This quote simply states that we all have responsibilities in our professional life to maintain an ethics standard that is acceptable to all cultures throughout the world. In my particular case, my organization frequently deals with all types of international cultures and ethics. We must learn and study these cultures so that we can understand what they believe in and what they deem as important to their organization. For instance, while delivering product to a new multi-dollar customer, we learned of an issue that could be construed as a minor defect in our product and would only be discovered if a rarely performed function was executed. In addition, we had an extremely tight deadline and if we had to recall this material, we would miss that deadline and cause the customer some very critical time. After numerous discussions we came to a realization that this particular country's ethics and culture would come into play. We surmised that they were very diligent in their testing practices and would eventually find the problem. Alongside with the fact that they prefer honesty and integrity in a business relationship, we felt duty-bound that we informed them of the issue. Subsequently, we had an emergency call with the client and informed them of the problem and that we had a mend for the issue. Not only were they impressed with our proactive attitude, they truly appreciated our honesty and upfront attitude. On the other hand, we discovered they had a contingency plan in place if something came to surface, which bought them enough time to cover the gap it would take to fix the problem. If we had not followed our company ethics and cultural guidelines, "Operating with a strong sense of integrity is critical to maintaining trust and credibility with our customers, partners, employees, and shareholders" (Mr. John Chambers, www.ciscosystems.com, January 2004) we would have potentially damaged our relationship to the point that we would have lost the business. As a result, we have built an extremely strong relationship that has been enjoyable and profitable for both parties.

Secondly, when it comes to personal ethics I like to think of the quote from Albert Schweitzer "The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings". This quote couldn't be more appropriate in today's society. Today the world is fast becoming a global society; we are moving and relocating to all parts of the world. As this new way of life is fast approaching, we must all learn and respect different cultures. Presently, I live in a very diverse neighborhood where everyone's ethics and cultural backgrounds are different. There are different religions varying from Jewish, Catholic and Jehovah witness. Also present in my neighborhood is different cultural and ethical backgrounds in regards to how a wife is subservient to husband while other households the wife works and the father is home as a full-time stay at home dad for the children. What makes this a great neighborhood is instead of making snap decisions and using stereotypes, which places a label on someone. I / We respected each others backgrounds and ask questions for example why someone's religious beliefs didn't allow them to drive a car on a certain day. If I or we didn't ask these questions we would not have learned from one another and tension would have run