Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts: Laura Nash, Ph.D is Senior Research Fellow on the faculty at Harvard Business School. When we discovered Laura, she was a professor of ethics at Boston University's Graduate School of Management and the author of the book, Good Intentions Aside. She has since co-authored with Howard Stevenson of Harvard, the book, Just Enough, Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life (John Wiley, March 2004). She is also the founding partner of a hedge fund called the Piper Cove Fund.

Laura told us that business people are actually in a lose-lose situation. They are often viewed by those outside the business world as greedy, mean or selfish. When doing something good, our motivations are questioned.

HATTIE: Doing the right thing matters, so, Laura, I want to know, is there such a thing as business ethics?

LAURA NASH: Well, most Americans think there is no such thing as business ethics. And you're damned before you start as a business person. If you do something ethical, and you make money, then it couldn't possibly be ethical because ethics must hurt, right? And if you do something unethical, then by definition, you have no ethics. So you can't win; I mean, it's absolutely impossible to win. Except that in capitalism, we have this contract -- this kind of social contract that actually does reward ethics when we structure laws properly.

I think the contract is very simple, and in my book, I call it "a covenant with the public."

What we say in a free market system is, "If you provide value in the marketplace, people will voluntarily respond with a reward to you."

HATTIE: Well, now, Laura, you wrote in an article in Harvard Business Review in 1981 that business ethics was a new discipline. Tell me what has happened to this discipline since you wrote that article.

LAURA: It's changed a lot. It's really almost in the second generation right now. So we're seeing a formal title in companies, a business ethics officer, an ombudsman. We're seeing more vehicles for talking about ethics.

Are they more effective than old-fashioned ways of dealing with business ethics before we had a term for it? The jury is out. I think there's a lot to be said for the informal transmission of values, and that's where small businesses really have it over big businesses.

To learn more:
1. Laura Nash, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer on the faculty of Harvard Business School
2. Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics Contact : Brian Moriarty
3. Explore how Auntie Anne's Pretzels goes beyond ethics
4. Do business your customer's way. Business is about service
5. Study many others whose social capital goes beyond ethics
6. Invest in your community
7. Explore our reasons for doing this television show
8. More references