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Business ethics is mostly played out in the daily interactions you have with other people. It's not the Enron/WorldCom corporate ethics that matter to most people as much as the honesty of the person standing right in front of them. How you treat the people during your regular workday sets the stage for whether or not you will crash when the inevitable personal ethical crisis comes. Your core values must match what you say to others. Of course, we're not just talking about the ethical no-brainers such as lying to coworkers or stealing company funds. We're talking about whether your everyday treatment of people (from lowest person in the organization to the highest) reflects the ethical values that you hold dear. In a nutshell, do you treat people right?

Why don't you sexually harass your coworker? Because you respect him or her as a person and it would be unthinkable to drag that person through the pain and torment that harassment brings. What's stopping you from taking credit for someone else's work? Because you would not want the same thing to happen to you. Why don't you take advantage of a customer's ignorance to cash in on a sale? It's because you understand that this destroys relationships and trust, which is what true success in business is built upon.

We are used to hearing about ethics from a punishment/consequences angle. Prison is not the primary reason you don't swindle your colleagues, tell racist jokes, or wield power over weaker individuals. The reason is that there's a right and a wrong way to treat people. It's not about you, it's about them. And you don't need a corporate code of conduct to tell you.

You may wonder why a coworker becomes a heartless dictator after a promotion? Why does a normal person behave like a sexual predator when around certain people? The reason is that he or she lacks or has lost a healthy perspective on human value and dignity. Respect is what compels us to treat people right whether or not they deserve it.
Consider a situation where one human has something cruel to another. You may wonder how a person can do such horrible things to another person. You figure that the individual is hardened and must have no feeling or regard for others. That may be the case, or possibly the abuser was just a normal person like you or me who lost perspective. Sometimes we get so caught up in ourselves that we forget who we are talking to.

What the workplace sexual harasser and someone on trial for war crimes have in common is that they both dehumanized others. They see the object of their harassment as less than human - as "beneath" them. The act of dehumanizing others strips away another person's intrinsic value and worth. Even in a small amount, this leads to a slippery slope. Once this kind of attitude is allowed a little room to grow it can lead down a path that may "justify" the mistreatment of others.

Everyone has feelings. Everyone has hopes, dreams, ambitions, and passions. We need to view others in a spiritual dimension that goes deeper than what they look like or how much they know. There is something deeper within all of us that begs for respect and honor no matter who we are. We should treat each other as priceless human beings who have the same capacity and potential we do.

There's no reason why the person on the other side of the sales counter or the person who speaks another language isn't deserving of the same honor that you expect to have. Becoming an ethical person at work starts with your honest interactions with everyone. The high profile corporate scandals share these same principles. Ethics starts somewhere. And the root ethical failures in the huge things are no different from the small matters we deal with every day.