The Architecture of Responsible Value Creation

Ethics is not the antithesis of the market. It is its prerequisite.

That was the key conclusion of my talk on the question: How can ethics be made verifiable?

We live in an age of tremendous innovative power, but also of growing risks. Every day, companies navigate the tension between value creation and value destruction.

After all, good intentions and the pursuit of profit are not enough for genuine value creation. Ultimately, organisations always operate between two poles:

• win-win, meaning sustainable success, trust and social benefit
• exploitation, meaning short-term profit at the expense of customers, employees and the environment.

The difference lies in the systematic integration of ethics into corporate objectives.

The key question is therefore no longer whether ethics is important, but rather:

How do we make ethics manageable and measurable?

With our model Values → Rights → Laws → Standards ethics becomes operational and therefore verifiable.

Another game-changer we are very keen to use is Value-Based Engineering. Based on IEEE 7000, this approach translates values directly into products, systems and decisions.

These ideas were discussed last week in Salzburg at the General Assembly of ProEthik, a fantastic initiative aimed at strengthening ethics in business. 

I’m looking forward to the next steps.