The business side of Dragon Thoughts Ltd has always tried to be ethical, but what does it mean for a company to be ethical.

No military work

In the case of Dragon Thoughts, the ethics include not working for the military, or on projects that might assist any military organisation. Summed up as “we don’t kill people and we don’t help others to kill people“. This has led to turning down some potentially lucrative Ministry of Defence work in the past.

Small company policy

Other parts of the ethical stance have included charging smaller and similarly ethical companies such as “Vacuum Formers” and “Mr Pillow” lower fees.

Industrial Espionage

Dragon Thoughts has also turned down an industrial spying contract… but without the proof, I can’t write more on that subject.

White Hat

For security systems, such as internet banking, spam detection and anti-virus software, Dragon Thoughts has always worked to ensure the software is as difficult to break as possible, and as effective at ensuring data is kept private. This has also been the Dragon Thoughts approach to Search Engine Optimisation projects. In short, like the cowboy in an old Western film, Dragon Thoughts employees wear the White Hats, and don’t try to things that are wrong or may be deleterious to other ethical bodies.

Doing good

Dragon Thoughts likes to think of the business in terms of the Hippocratic oath of “do no harm“. However, Dragon Thoughts likes to take this one step further, and actually try to do good. For example, on this Blog, you will see various scams exposed, and information regarding the black hatted spammers.

Finance

Some financial institutions, have a bad record of supporting regimes that deny human rights, others have their own positive ethical policies. Dragon Thoughts tries to deal only with ethical financial institutions, such as the mutuality based building societies and the Co-operative bank group, which has its own, very strong ethical policy.

What next?

What else do you think Dragon Thoughts should add to its ethical policy? How do you think you would assess a company for its ethics.



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