ABSTRACT

Management at Purdue University Ethics in business-just as in religion, education, and government-are critically important to the achievement of success over the long term.

Business, particularly international business, is completely interwoven with society, which dictates the rules by which business conducts itself. Society ultimately rewards those companies that play by the rules of the game and penalizes those that do not. The same rules apply to individu­ als as well as to organizations. Origins of High Standards Throughout my career at Lilly, I have observed how ethical standards can be applied and how they can produce great benefits to a business over a long period of time. Lilly was operated much as a family business until the 1960s and early 1970s when it emerged as a large, publicly owned enter­ prise. The Lilly family set the company’s attitudes and philosophies in place at the very beginning. Their standards were so high that they were not only most unusual for their time but they could only be called vision­ ary. Much of the company’s success has to be attributed to the establish­ ment of those attitudes and philosophies very early in the company’s history-and the fact that the organization has adhered to them rigor­ ously over the years.