Framework for Ethics

Introduction Regulations, moral values along with business ethics, form the basis of governance in the corporate world. Ethical standards should decide situations that are not expressly governed by regulation or law. Ethics is defined as standards used by companies to conduct their business operations. Standards are what define a company (Corey et al, 2011). Ethics should not be used as a sale item to the highest bidder. It would be easy for a company to ignore ethics in a bid to increase its sales and profits. It will only take such a company to deviate from its standards and tarnish its name. It is vital for a company, therefore, to adhere to standards. Standards should be the drive of any business decision. If customers realize, that a company is unable to make right decisions, the impression the company leaves to the customers may be unfavorable and changing this image may be an overwhelming task. To alleviate the burden of establishing and maintaining standards in corporations, different techniques have been set up to measure the structural and behavioral organizational ethics. Six Sigma and Balanced Scorecard are some of the models used by companies to enhance business performance and ethics.
Six Sigma Model If standards are set aside for short-term gain, they suffer in the end. Ethical standards must therefore be absolute. The right decisions made by a company may not always be the most lucrative. Having ethical standards though, has given most business corporations the tools to make and follow the right decisions. Six Sigma is a set of strategies used by companies for quality improvement. In many organizations, Six Sigma simply means a quality measure that strives for perfection (Eckes, 2004). It is a data-driven approach and process for doing away with defects. This is done through driving towards six standard deviations between the nearest specification limit and the mean. To realize Six Sigma, the process must produce less than