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TOPIC: ISSUE43 - "To be an effective leader, a public official must maintain the highest ethical and moral standards."
WORDS: 550 DATE: 2007-7-18
Whether a successful leader requires maintaining the highest ethical and moral standards is a complex issue which is fraught with problems of defining ethics, morality and successful leadership. To facilitate working out this issue, we can consider from three special realms: business, science research and politics.
In the realm of business, effective leaders are those who generally make maximum profits for the firms. To achieve maximization of profit, some business leaders who do not care ethics and morality may do something that increases the profit rapidly in short term, for example, cheating customers with goods of weak quality. This kind of deeds indeed can help make more money in short term, yet the customers would feel cheated and would not buy commodities from that store again resulting that the store has fewer customers and eventually decrease of sales as well as profit. On the contrary, real successful business leaders are always honest, reliable, and never cheat their customers and partners. For instance, take Li Jiacheng who is the richest Chinese and the leader of Chinese businessmen as an example. Li Jiacheng has gained highest credit in trade because he can always keep his promise to his business partners so that famous corporations would like to cooperate with him and make maximum profit together. So successful leadership in business realm requires the leader maintain highest ethical and moral standards.
In the science research realm, a successful leader should be capable to complete the research project and advance knowledge in their studies with the least cost in shortest time. Most effective project leaders are scientists who take their research seriously and pursuit truth of nature. For instance, the research leaders in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) work hard to advance knowledge in their fields of study. They report their results objectively and honestly so that they can make the most cutting-edge breakthroughs in all fields and therefore CAS becomes the top research institution of China. However, project leaders in some university made use of fraud results to bilk the government fund. Those dishonest scholars wasted money of taxpayers, impeded the advancement of science research and were punished for their behaviors at last. In short, leaders of science research require being of high level of ethics and morality.
Although the leaders in the realms of business and science research require having the highest ethical and moral standards, whether the political leaders require doing so is not easy to determine. On the one hand, political leaders need to maintain highest morality and those who wielded their power by immoral means were about to lose their leadership, for example, Nixon and Hitler. On the other hand, political leaders have to violate some morality for the interests of the country, for example, lying to keep the highest secrets of the government, refusing to answer the array of the army and so forth. So political leaders should keep the moral and ethical standards and meanwhile have to violate them for the country.
In sum, maintaining the highest ethical and moral standards is necessary to successful leaders in realms of business and science research; or they would fail eventually. Yet in the political realm, leaders on the one hand should make decisions whether they would violate the standards of morality and ethics according to the special situations. |
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