Business done right: Ethics winners driven by values.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Business Done Right

"The smaller your business, the less you can get away with," says Sam Cassidy, chairman of the Department of Business Ethics and Legal Studies at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. And good business ethics are just as important to small businesses as large ones.

"If you are running a business, whether it has 10,000 employees or 10 employees, there are relationships of trust which are essential to your success," Cassidy says.

"If I have employees, that is a relationship. They trust me. To the extent that they think I care about their welfare and their development, and that I want them to be successful, and to be happy, and to make a decent living, then they trust me and they are going to work a lot harder.

"Customers? What is more important than trust between a business and its customers?

"Business has a function in society," Cassidy says, "and it's not just to make money." People are in business to provide their community with something that changes other people's lives, and good customers are people who trust that a vendor's product or service will have a positive effect on them.

"I can't be an expert in everything," said Cassidy, a lawyer, former state senator and a former lieutenant governor. As a customer, "I'm looking for someone to trust."

"It's my firm conviction that if you don't run your business based on values, you are doomed to failure at some point. But if values are the driving force in the way you make decisions and in how you relate to the community, to your employees, to your customers and to your suppliers, you will be successful over the long haul."

On March 4, another lawyer, who has spent his entire career in Denver, a Denver hospital that has become a national treasure, and three businesses that have gained a reputation for the trust that Cassidy says lies at the root of successful businesses, will be honored as the winners of the 12th Colorado Ethics in Business Awards.

James E. Bye, a tax attorney with Holme Roberts & Owen, is the winner of this year's Daniel L. Ritchie Award, and National Jewish Medical & Research Center, the winner of the Samaritan Institute Award. Aspen Skiing Co., Village Homes of Colorado and the Downing Street Garage were named business ethics award winners.

The Colorado Business Ethics Awards were founded by ColoradoBiz, the University of Denver Daniels College of Business, the Samaritan Institute, which gives its name to one of the awards, the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Society of Financial Service Professionals and the Rotary Clubs of Colorado.

Cassidy said ethics policies and mission statements--the kind that get written and posted by large and small companies that then ignore them--are no substitute for top management or the owner of a company making a statement of his or her ethics through example.

"If you've ever had a boss that you thought was just out for themselves, for himself or herself, well, you don't work very hard for that person," he said. But the boss who demonstrates his or her principles--for dealing with customers, fellow workers and others day after day--sets a pattern that becomes a standard of behavior for the entire company. "It's what people do," Cassidy said. "Employees are not stupid, they're paying attention all the time."

The owner of a small business can demonstrate his or her company's ethics in the way people are hired, and then in the way management holds others to the standards required of staff.

"It really is important to create an environment where everyone is value-aligned," he said. "Everyone knows their purpose, why they are there, and everyone has their heart in doing that, and feels fulfilled by that work.

"Who gets promoted in an organization? If you're promoting people who are back-stabbers, and close the deal on some other employee's back, that's exactly the kind of performance you're going to get.

"Just as surely as you use incentives like promotions and raises and complimenting people for different things, if there's someone that doesn't fit, you can discipline people. Just as there are carrots, there are also sticks.

"There are people who need constant signals ... that you expect something more. You have to try to change the attitude or move them out."

The five Business Ethics Awards honorees, from big businesses to small, from an individual to whole organizations, have demonstrated they expect as much. "That's what business ethics is all about," said Cassidy. Trust.

HONOREE DANIEL L. RITCHIE AWARD

JAMES E. BYE

PARTNER, HOLME ROBERTS & OWEN

James Bye accepted his first job as a lawyer in Denver at Holme Roberts & Owen 47 years ago because when he left his hometown in Minnesota it was 32 degrees below zero, and in Denver, where he was being interviewed, it was 70 degrees above. "Maybe I should try this," he remembered thinking.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But Bye has been no fair-weather partner of the firm.

Holme Roberts is the only firm Bye has ever worked for, and as a tax...