Is it okay to be unethical to win?

To compete is to aim for an end goal that is congruent with one’s ambition. Just like people, businesses too have goals to meet, milestones to attain, markets to capture and profit to make. When a business proposes a new idea into the market, there is nothing so novel anymore and there is always someone else who has done the same thing.

To some extent, whether it is FMCG, F&B, oil, real estate, technology or transportation, every industry is full of cut-throat competition that makes entry for newer ides quite difficult. As such, businesses, both big and small, feel the pressure to stay relevant and to have a strong hold in the market. This is the real competition that drives them to continuously revamp, reinvent and renew themselves. Every business wants to be in vogue.

But, the problem today is that a lot of organization will do anything to get the higher position in the market. “All is fair in love and war”, they say, and so is it in business as well. The whole concept of having to compete to get to the top is doing things, both good and bad, to the respective industries.
The good part is that it is driving organisations to work harder and be better than more. It is putting more pressure to come up with ideas that are creative and unheard of. However, in my opinion, in many cases, ethics and the idea of abiding by a moral code of conduct is waning.

Ethics refers largely to a set of norms about how to behave, what to do, what to say and how to say it. It applies to humans and organisations alike. We not just follow industry ethics but also personal ethics such as not lying, not resorting to violence or speaking politely to every one, to name a few. Often, individual and organisational ethics even tend to overlap where one has to be sacrificed for the other.

But the question at hand here whether completion has killed ethics in business.
I believe that to some extent, it has. It has made the playing field susceptible to corruption, politics and dishonesty. It has driven to letting companies believe that the means do not matter as long as you reach the end goal. So, in that way, competition has killed ethics.

But, as an optimist I’d also like to believe that not every seed in the world of business is bad. There are still companies that would rather function according to policies and norms. Do they generally suffer for not participating in the mean game? Maybe, yes.


Sadly, there are fewer examples of these companies than the former.

For instance, let us take the case of the pharmaceutical industry and how the Ranbaxy controversy raised questions about the dangers of being unethical in such an industry. Two employees at Ranbaxy in India managed to raise caution to the fact that they were manufacturing adulterated drugs in their labs. The FDA was even alerted about Ranbaxy’s adulteration and forgery and later took them to court for the same. In 2013, Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to charges of drug safety and admitted that the drugs they were selling were not in compliance with good manufacturing standards. The fines and forfeitures in the entire settlement came up to $500 million, not including the immense damage to their image and reputation. Resorting to such practices was especially harmful for Ranbaxy considering the life-threatening danger they were putting their consumers in since the medicine industry is one that must stick to every code and rule about manufacturing.

Another common case would the Maggi scandal. Nestle was supposed to have overlooked the excess amount of lead in Maggi instant noodles and was caught for the same. Under Food Safety and Standards (Contaminants, Toxins and Residues) Regulations, 2011, permissible levels of lead range from 0.2 parts per million in infant milk substitute and infant foods to 10 ppm in categories like baking powder, tea, dehydrated onions, dried herbs and spices flavourings. For instant noodles included in the “foods not specified category”, the permitted level of lead is 2.5 ppm. Maggi had 17.2 ppm. As a result of this, Maggi, the biggest shareholder in this industry, had to be recalled from stores and manufacturing had to be stopped. In fact, they lost 80% of the market share and dealt with a huge blow to their reputation.

All of these lead us to question whether it is okay to do something unethical in order to gain more power. While the cases above are extreme, maybe at a much smaller level it would okay to do that as long as you do not hurt someone. But, the cases about also show that in such instances, being unethical is not in anyone’s interest, especially the public’s. Competition drove companies to overlook things that are otherwise unforgivable. It takes many years to build goodwill but one such move can shatter it all.

Hence, I believe that while some competition is good for the growth of any business, it should not be done at the cost of sacrificing ethics. These ethics are formulated keeping in mind the greater good of the society and they should be adhered to in order to win by honesty and sheer hard work.