🧭 Morals and Ethics in Business

Hey Builders! 🚀

Here’s what you’re going to learn today:

⚖️ About Morals and Ethics (and how it affects your business)
❓ Question to ask yourself
⭐️ Sean’s checkered experience with cross-cultural communications
👀 Tom Pierce shares what it’s like being a defense contractor and pastor (two VERY different career paths)

Reading time: 5 minutes

About Morals and Ethics

Before we talk about them, let’s get these definitions out of the way:

Morals are a set of ideals that individuals tend to live by based on what they believe is “right” or “wrong.”

Ethics are a set of ideals that are imposed culturally on one’s citizens.

Morals can differ between individuals of a given culture, and religious groups have their own set of ethics that may be counter to the ethical code handed down by a government, so this can get messy at times.

Having lived in the USA, China, Vietnam, and now Portugal, I’ve had to learn, understand, and appreciate/tolerate that the morals and ethics of the peoples of those societies may be different than my own.

And that’s the most important thing I want to impart on you today.

Not everyone has your morals, ethics, and standards.

Despite this, you almost definitely continue to approach relationships with others as if they shared those same standards as you.

As a result, most relationships fail miserably.

Therefore, if you want to succeed in life, you need to understand why this is, and how you can resolve it.

Are you guilty of making this mistake?

Once you understand this, and really internalize it, and start to put yourself in other people’s shoes as you approach these relationships, you will unlock a new level of existence that will skyrocket your growth potential.

Why Do Different Cultures Have Different Morals and Ethics?

Every culture that has persisted for any length of time longer than 100 years has had time to impart knowledge from the past on its descendants, which over time becomes social norms.

As time passes, the world changes, and those norms become updated to fit what feels right.

Some time ago, it was seen as normal to bind women’s feet in China, as it was believed that women should be dainty, and small feet would show that off.

Around the same time, Chinese men shaved the front of their head and maintained very long ponytails.

Both of these norms stopped around 100 years ago because the last Emperor stepped down, and his abdication enabled the Nationalists to come to power (that’s not the end of the story, but we’ll leave it there because this isn’t a history or political lesson).

During the Cold War, there were a number of societies under Soviet control that valued keeping their opinions to themselves in order to avoid scrutiny and potential detention or execution.

If an American traveled to one of these societies at that time, they might have quickly found trouble for possibly pushing the locals to speak up for themselves (because Americans have always valued freedom of speech to the point of being willing to die to protect it).

Hopefully these few poignant examples can help you to begin to understand that the history of each society has played out differently, which has lead to different ethics, which in turn has given rise to vastly different morality at an individual level within those societies.

What other examples of this can you think of?

How does that affect humans in today’s modern world?

Technology has enabled humans from all over the world to communicate instantaneously with one another, as well as travel speedily to other countries.

But globalization has been unable to change how people from different cultures see the world.

Because these differences are still so vast between cultures and individuals, they color our relationships.

As a result, every interaction we have occurs through that lens, no matter what color it is tinted.

Therefore, the way we live our lives is different, the way we think is different, the way we do business, the way we love, the way we spend our time, everything is completely different.

So why would should we assume that it’s possible our morals or ethics are the same across cultures, generations, languages, and timezones?

How can we resolve it?

The USA has done a piss-poor job of trying to impose its standards on other cultures, so I highly suggest we don’t attempt this at a personal level.

If we’re going to interact with other humans, we will only have successful relationships if we approach them with curiosity instead of judgement.

Assuming they are similar to us sets us up for failure, rejection, and ridicule.

People love talking about themselves, so asking questions from a place of genuine curiosity and desire to learn opens people up to wanting to know us too.

It’s that sincerity which makes cross-cultural relationships possible, and from which fruitful business partnerships blossom.

Do you think it’s easy or difficult to change your mind in this way?

Sean’s experience with cultural misunderstanding

Having lived in 4 countries long-term, I can say I’ve experienced a LOT of cultural misunderstanding and judgement hurled at me JUST for being a citizen of the USA.

The most common problem is making generalizations about a person based on where they come from.

They failed to take into consideration that I spent my entire 20s and part of my 30s in China, which actually made me feel like China was more of my home than the USA, and they failed to recognize that because of my deep fluency in Mandarin, I had also come to adopt and internalize many Chinese morals and standards, which took me even further away from their idea of what an “American” was like.

In fact, I relish the experiences I’ve had because living amongst different cultures and becoming fluent in different languages has allowed me to take a step back from these insults and be able to calmly explain to the ones trying to poke and prod me to cause undue suffering that I can understand why they felt that way, and in fact while it might be true for some American citizens, it’s not true for all of us, and that it was unfair to make those assumptions because they didn’t know anything about me beyond the passport I carried with me.

From this, I’ve tried my best to not make assumptions about other people, because I would be just as wrong as those who did that to me.

If you want to learn about how a defense contractor handles being a pastor at the same time, you definitely want to watch our interview with Tom Pierce!

Next Friday, we will talk about Self-Awareness and Adaptability, see you then!

“If you want to understand yourself, learn about others first.” ~Sean Weisbrot

Listen to the interview here:

• YouTube

• iTunes

• Spotify