from richard's personal notes on ethics.

[draft version of monday, 18 october '93]

a few thoughts on personal ethics vs business ethics:  

some people's personal ethics are perceived by themselves
to be simply un-matchable, and for that reason they may never
come to grips with the idea of having an equal partner,
or a truly equal partner, or two, and they shall find 
themselves going it alone, by choice or because they simply
have not been able to find anyone who meets their standards.

some individuals apparently were born with this characteristic;
others have developed it along the way:  often after having 
been burned slightly, or badly, once, or numerous times,
depending on their learning rate :-) or their skin thickness 
and faith in their fellow man (at least during one's younger years).

at the other extreme, we hear of a "traditional business ethic"
practiced by a person or team or corporation or institution
which believes it must do absolutely _whatever_ is felt to be
neccessary to accomplish some task on the way to the goal
of making their start-up "behave" successfully, just like the
big corporations:   (some examples from my personal experiences
follow, sans dates and details.  they cover my early time range
from paying attention and being involved in family businesses;
small school-based enterprises;  older friends' start-up projects,
throughout my teen-age years of involvement;  15 years of my
own small business enterprise activities;  mit start-ups;  and
my own private, non-profit operating foundation which was a
small cambridge based r&d and educational institute;  more
recently, i've learned to pay a different kind of very close
attention to what goes on behind the scenes among start-ups
i've had the opportunity to follow very closely in the mit
entrepreneurs club, and among clients i've worked with in
the outside world.  the following stuff happens at all levels
and among all kinds of team members, regardless of the scale
of operations, and regardless of whether the enterprise
is hi-tech or no-tech.  

o  cutting people out of teams or deals after important work 
has been done by them that couldn't have been done otherwise; 

o  inflating or totally faking resumes or previous business
experiences and personal or corporate track records; 

o  claiming that other team members never relayed-on certain
important facts, or that documentation was never requested, or
received, or that some other team person "b" now has those items
and it's no longer member "a"'s responsibility;

o  falsifying personal or corporate credit claims; 

o  patent infringement, plagiarism, industrial spying, rumor 
mongering beyond-the-truth about a company's value to deflate
it's worth so one may pull a take-over at lower cost and
then go in and trash the company by selling everything,
(the list is really endless, just read the wsj);

o  people doing start-ups who claim working or other extraordinary
relationships with corporations, banks, foundations and
successful individuals to get another's attention without the
proper introductions.  these may range from name-dropping to,
in more recent cases in the mit entrepreneurs club, having
claimed active, regular membership and working on numerous
projects and with mit people, when non of us can recall the
person having ever presented an idea or even once attended
a regular meeting to help de-bug other's ideas or otherwise
lend a hand doing real work :-) ... it happens, but not often.

somewhere in between there lie the majority of start-up
situations, with some continuous agonising over how to
handle instances where the founder or the team, might deal 
with daily operations that perhaps require a bending of one's
own rules, once in a while ... to the extent that when
the company is at the point of being able to say it has
developed it's own corporate micro-culture, then the
team has it's own ethic that hopefully reflects the 
personal ethics of the founder or original idea originator.

as applied to the thinking and writing assignment, think
back to books, papers, movies or plays you've experienced,
should your own personal life have been charmed, so-far,
and pull out the various relevant characters' qualities and
begin plugging them into your relationship matrix, and
your best and worse case final scenes should shape up nicely.

think of designing your team along the lines of a very
serious courtship routine, and as always in good engineering
practice, design around the worse possible case.

we can discuss this all in detail in the seminar when
all the papers are turned in and we start reviewing them.

	- r
.