Welcome Baywalk readers to the March edition of Creating Success Viewpoint on Baywalk.com. We finish our three part series entitled "It's all about Focus" with this month's installment, "A Focus on Ethics." We hope it proves enlightening and thought provoking to our readers.

During the last three months, we have discussed the challenges that companies and their leadership experience, regarding obtaining and maintaining a business focus that leads to success. In January we covered the problems companies experience when they have too broad or too narrow a business focus. We discussed nearsighted and farsighted perspectives of leadership and the impact on company morale and how these perspective problems undermined company efforts to attain their corporate goals.

In February, we covered the concepts of strategy and tactics, and reviewed some excellent definitions of these concepts provided by an educator named Anshoff. His ability to break strategy and tactics into simple phrases, provided us a simple and easy to use understanding of these critical components of business success.

• Strategy is a matter of effectiveness
• Tactics is a matter of efficiency or
• Strategy - To do the right thing!
• Tactics - To do the thing right!

This month I want to change the orientation of the phrase, "To do the right thing" to discuss a problem that is rampant in business today; the loss of business ethics. Thirty years ago readers would have been shocked to hear a writer assert that ethics had been lost in business. After all, everyone knew that good business was business that was attained through "doing the right thing." Doing the right thing covered a whole host of business actions:

• Providing a quality product.
• Providing good customer service.
• Standing behind your product.
• Treating your employees fairly.
• Maintaining an operation that provided shareholders with long term value and growth in their investments.

Having the right "stuff" meant attracting and retaining the best employees in terms of knowledge, work habits, loyalty, and commitment to providing the best product to customers.

Somewhere along the evolutionary track of business, we lost the concept of "doing the right thing." How, I am not really sure. I would suggest that several different factors lead to the erosion of business ethics such as:

• The erosion of Christian ethics as the basis of our society.
• Greed by generations of workers and management that forgot about the horror of the depression.
• Fear of foreign competition, failure to change, and finding short term solutions that lacked integrity.
• A short term orientation by investors, workers, leadership, and society that places money and profit margins above quality, loyalty, commitment, long term gains.
• The devaluation of people as a critical asset for success.

If you can't relate in any way to the above, then I can not help you. I do not have the writing skills to create a philosophical argument that will persuade you that something important is missing from too many businesses today.

If you can relate to my thoughts, then I encourage you to work in your own way to bring "doing the right thing" back to business. If you are a business leader, I entreat you to step back and evaluate your company and its management and business philosophy's. If you find yourself or your company lacking in anyway, step boldly forward to make the changes necessary to "do the right thing" in your company.

I will leave you with this final thought. I grew up dirt poor in the Midwest, raised by a mom and dad that lacked a college education and worked hard every day of their lives. They saved so I could go to college and have a "better life" than they had, living through the depression and World War II. Two college degrees later, twenty plus years of helping people, the turnaround of two insolvent companies, the growth of a regional company into a national leader, the successful introduction of U.S. concepts into international markets, I still hold fast to two principles that my parents gave me.

• First, that success is founded on people, good, loyal, and committed employees.
• Second, if something is worth doing, it is worth doing right.

Business Success is all about Focus; but success without ethics is of short duration, leaves one feeling empty, and is rarely worth the cost to humanity.

See you next month.