Dr Jeff Cornwall

I found an interesting perspective on the ethical challenges faced by entrepreneurs in an opinion piece by Jack Roseman published in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.com.
“(W)e give up our principles in painless little slices. Each lapse doesn’t seem so bad. It’s only in retrospect that we see how slippery the slope really was.
“Tugging us down that slope is greed, our insatiable desire for more money, more power, etc.
“Someone said the reason time seems to accelerate as we age is that each year we are living out a smaller proportion of our total life span. I think something like that goes on with ethics. The more material wealth we have, the less we value it, and so the more we are driven to attain even more.
“My theory is that the more you make, the greedier you become.”
My co-author Mike Naughton says that this becomes the problem when we view wealth as the singular, ultimate goal in a business rather than as an important outcome of the pursuit of good and moral ends. Wealth is not a bad thing; quite the contrary. The ability to pursue wealth is essential in a free society. But to view wealth as the only outcome of our entrepreneurial activities can cause us to eventually corrupt our souls: with each decision, with each non-decision, with each action, and with each inaction.