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Invisible Hand Greased Palm Summary

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Invisible Hand Greased Palm Summary
INVISIBLE HAND, GREASED PALM. By: Surowiecki, James, New Yorker, 0028792X, 5/14/2012, Vol. 88, Issue 13

The “Invisible Hand, Greased Palm” written by James Surowiecki, is an article that focuses on business ethics and more specifically on bribes, and whether or not they should be allowed. The article begins by giving the history of federal acts that were put into place to try and limit the amount of corruption in business around the world. The first of such act was Foreign Corruption Practices Act, which banned bribery of foreign public officials. The F.C.P.A was symbolically important and didn’t do much, originally, to cut down on corruption. However, after 1997 much was done by the O.E.C.D. and the U.N. to cut down on corruption, and corruption …show more content…
James Surowiecki neatly sums this point up by simply stating, “good behavior is also good business(Surowiecki 2012)”. You don’t have to be in a global business environment to feel the importance of ethical behavior, and ethical decisions making. One of the main goals of a manager is creating an ethical climate in their company so that every employee knows where the company's stance is on right and wrong (Bateman & Snell 2009). Obviously an easy thing to stress in your ethical environment is that bribery is wrong, and as a company we would never do that, but if you have built a strong ethical environment you shouldn’t have to come up and openly state that. Employees would know that bribery is complete outside the bounds of what this company would allow to happen and wouldn’t even consider …show more content…
It has been shown that, “social responsibility is associated with better financial performance”. This is an extremely important point to make when talking about business ethics. If there was no value in social responsibility and ethical behavior, then what are the incentives for organizations like FIFA? They are already and extremely profitable organization, so they need to be incentivised to be more socially responsible with the argument that they could become even more profitable if they cleaned up their image and gave more back to society. This will be the driving force behind change in the future. That social responsibility is not a financial burden, or something nice to do to gain trust, but it is something that can make you even more money. So ethical and social businesses need to spread the word, and “persuade others to join them there(Surowiecki
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