Dr. Cornwall made a great post on The Entrepreneurial Mind about bootstrapping which should be a must-read for any budding entrepreneur or business leader (A Veteran at Bootstrapping Offers Advice). However, one thing I noticed about the list of advice offered was that maintaining your ethics was relegated to the #3 spot:

“3. Keep Your Priorities in Order. Never compromise your ethical principles, even when money [is] tight.”

I doubt this was a situation of intentional demotion of ethics beneath the importance of cash (#1) or “less is more” (#2). Instead, I think the order was simply circumstantial. When presented with the need to bootstrap, the first logical order of business is most likely to maximize cash. And accordingly, with fewer resources, most innovators will become more resourceful, not less. And then yes, maintaining one’s ethics is extremely important…

But what about shifting the order? If you make maintaining ethics your first piece of advice, even before the mention of cash or the principle of “less is more,” what type of a statement are you making? Is it a different statement than when ethics is your third piece of advice?

Again, in this case, I don’t think the order of advice intentionally demoted the importance of ethics. Instead, I think ordering it as such provides an excellent opportunity to create dialogue about the subject.

TAGS: Ethics | Bootstrapping | Strategy | Principles

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 5th, 2006 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Business Ethics, CalPoly MBA, Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Enterprise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.