Well, it’s that time of the year again to take the company’s ethics course. Over the course of my career, I have sat through a number of ethics courses, some of which were excruciatingly boring, not to mention as painful as sticking a dull knife in your eye. Too often organizations establish a requirement that everyone has to go through ethics training, not unlike sexual harassment training, in order to check a box on a form to naïvely assume everyone is going to behave accordingly.
“Ethics” is a nebulous topic; truly different in definition from one person to another. What may be unethical to you might be completely ethical to me. Throw into the mix the social culture of an individual’s homeland, even within the United States, and things get muddled quickly.