As business owners or managers, we often have to make difficult ethical decisions, such as whether to keep its production work by hand or whether to use new technologies to increase productivity as well as to enhance profits. In this case, the manager of a privately held publishing firm was asked to implement new computer-base publishing process; this new technology caused the job loss of some employees. It may be a while until employees can learn and get used to the new technology, consequently the productivity has dropped drastically by 40%. Moreover, the manager was asked to prepare a presentation on the positive results of using the new technology to a group of people interested in buying this organization. Some of the questions to be answered in this dilemma are whether the proposed action is legal, does it maximize shareholder value, and is it ethical not to do the presentation.
First, the proposed action is considered legal because at this point it is just a presentation; the contractual process to buy the company is not in process at this time. If the purchase of the company was taking place at this time, then they would have to provide financial statements showing the results of the new technology. In addition, they would also have to show some facts about how the new technology could increase their productivity and enhance their profit. Besides, the owner has the right to be optimistic about the new system. As the founder's son stated, the production loss was written off as a learning curve. Once the employees get more training and more experience with the new system they will feel more comfortable, thus productivity will probably pick up again. However, it is unethical to do the p ...