PRACTICAL APPROACH TO ETHICS IN CZECH SMES: LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCES OF OTHER COUNTRIES

This paper deals with a controversial issue - practical ethics in day-to-day business. Companies publish their corporate governance statement in their annual reports, but this almost never critically assesses whether these codices have any meaning in their ongoing business. Their main purpose reduces to the attempt to attract the attention of new customers and possible investors in order to raise sales and improve profits. We approach ethics in corporation as a discipline with practical and measurable outputs. To arrive to quantifiable variables we link the company ethics with measurable and attainable goals and suggest to employ the approach of Kaplan and Norton (1992), who proposed the definition of key performance indicators to measure vaguely defined phenomena. Linking with the experience of our German partners, our paper contributes to current stream of literature in highlighting pragmatic ethics as an important part of corporate social responsibility. The resulting study provides a new approach to practicing ethics especially in small and medium sized companies.