ETHICS
IN ACTION
To Be or Not To Be ... ETHICAL? BY EDWARD EMIL SZAKY, CCAM
R
ecent news reports have pointed to a number of examples of what appear to be decisions and actions driven by what we can acknowledge as “poor” ethics. For the sake of brevity, I will mention just a few. It was discovered that Volkswagen had recently presented distorted and false data to regulators and its customers about the performance of its vehicles. It is interesting to note here that this is not a small, obscure company but an international corporation, and the scale of its misrepresentation is huge. Simply put, the company lied to just about everyone to sell its vehicles. A second example is the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli. He quickly went to being the world’s most notorious executive when he bought a company that manufactures a life-saving drug, and in order to increase the profits, raised the price from $13.50 to $750 per tablet. Lastly, there is the matter of FIFA, the organization that heads international soccer, whose executives were arrested for corruption. Apparently they were taking bribes to fix the geographical location of important matches. These are clearly situations that can easily be identified as breaches in what the average person would call ethical conduct. I have managed shopping centers, office buildings, industrial parks and apartments. My personal belief is we work in what is perhaps the most challenging sector of real estate management. One of the primary reasons for this is the many different personalities and perspectives we deal with during the course of our daily function as managers and the often complex situations we encounter as a result of those interactions. We encounter many situations that create both ethical and legal dilemmas in our communities. We deal with people’s homes, their problems with their neighbors, pets, drugs, parking, noise, and the sometimes difficult challenge of enforcing rules regarding these issues Continued on page 42
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Vision Spring 2016 | www.cacm.org
