Exploring Ethics in Contemporary Business - Assignment Example

The paper "Exploring Ethics in Contemporary Business " is a perfect example of a business assignment. Ethics indicates the moral principles that an individual incorporates in his behavioural activities. Business ethics is the application of ethical principles and practices into business management. In contemporary business, incorporating business ethics in the business policies and practices are most important in order to control controversial issues such as corporate governance, bribery and insider trading (Vilcox and Mohan, 2007).

However, increasing employment of all such practices in contemporary business has forced multiple companies to forget the business ethics they should integrate into their business activities and consequently, all such companies are experiencing severe business crashes (Koslowski, 2000). Companies like Monsanto Co., Halliburton Oil and Gas Co., Chevron Co. etc are ranked in the list of the least ethical index in the world. In order to understand how the failure of corporate ethics may lead a company towards destruction, the case of Lehman Brothers will be analysed in this paper.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. was the fourth-largest US-based global financial services firm that had collapsed in 2008, mainly due to excessive risk-taking behaviour and unethical business practices (Addo, 2010). Therefore, how negligence and elimination of ethical rules in the business process of Lehman Brothers caused the company to be bankrupt and collapse will be critically analysed. For the purpose of analysis, a conceptual map will be drawn and accordingly the research questions will be answered.

Discussion The bankruptcy and collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the largest investment banking and treasury securities trading firm, played a major role in unfolding the economic downturn in 2008. In order to evaluate the research questions relating to the ethical ground of such collapse of Lehman Brothers, designing a concept map is important (Schapiro, 2010). Concept mapping leads to identify the ideas or concepts and accordingly prepare a diagram that shows the coherent relationship between the ideas and theoretical approaches.

Considering the conceptual map for ethical issues of Lehman Brothers, the following diagram can be drawn.