Small business faces a tempting problem. When struggling to find an acceptable profit margin (or to find any profit at all, for that matter) cutting legal corners is an all too tempting solution.
Some talk I have heard recently suggests a "board of accountability" for small businesses or even individual entrepreneurs. This is not a board as a legal or managerial body, but rather an "advisory council" or group brought together to help make the business reach its full potential while staying within all ethical and legal boundaries.
So many entrepreneurs have no guidance but their own dreams. Often, the struggles and temptations that come with the territory can slowly change those dreams into quite unintentional nightmares. Even a small degree of accountability could solve the majority of the problems we face.
It is easy to discount the risk of failure before anything has gone wrong; it is easy to disregard the usefulness of a simple council that could make such a big difference. Hindsight is 20/20.
If an entrepreneur wants to be successful in both a financial and ethical realm, asking for help from a few respected friends or collegues would be the simplest solution to such a huge problem. Discussing the issues, asking advice, and being brave enough to ask if something is right or wrong will keep most business people far away from any ethical grey area.
I am working on finding a few folks myself who can work together in just such a way: forming my own advisory council. And since I live in a fairly remote area, I have chosen to make this "board" an e-mail based board. The kind of folks that I want to invite are not exactly within meeting distance. Living in the Chinese countryside has its disavantages.
However, the e-mail solution to such a board has a few incredible positives. The most important is that I can bring together an incredible diversity of people: executives, others working in a cross-cultural situations, small business people from my hometown, and many others who are uniquely suited for the New Frontier board of accountability.
Of course, there is always a way to trick the system. I could easily fib, and thus take away all accountability from this system. What would I gain from that, though? Nobody is forcing me to create this board...well, some have suggested it. Still, I am not doing this to satisfy some requirement, but because I want to join together with others, to gain from their experience and viewpoint in ways that will help make my business not only profitable, but also an example of how business could be conducted to the benefit of all involved.
