'Talk about ethics needs to be firmly rooted in the experiences of business, employees and professionals.'

In July 1998, the Caux Conference for Business and Industry held its 25th annual conference, over five days. It opened with a call from Berlin-based Professor Klaus-Heinrich Standke for businesses to 'move away from the exclusive concern with shareholder value'. His call came just at a time when major German corporations, including Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, Hoechst and Bertelesmann, had embarked on a $68 billion global acquisitions spree, driven partly by the need to improve shareholder value by becoming global players.1

Speaking on values in the new Europe, Standke, President of the Internationale Akademie Schloss Baruth in Berlin, who has trained hundreds of East European entrepreneurs in the free market system, said that the challenge facing Eastern and Western Europe was to ensure work for everyone. Company chairmen needed to include social as well as economic factors in their decisions, and Europe also needed to put North-South relations at the top of the agenda for the coming century--something which was quite absent at present, he said.

Another speaker was the Australian entrepreneur David Bussau, co-founder of the non-profit organization Opportunity International (OI) which in 1997 alone created 151,000 jobs in 27 countries--a job every three and half minutes throughout the year. The Sydney-based organization raised finance in seven developed nations to make loans to start up small job-creating projects in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The vision was 'a job for every family', Bussau said. For every job created, six people, including family members, were taken out of absolute poverty. OI's loans averaged $400, and over 27 years of activity, the repayment rate averaged 95 per cent. 'Credit is a vital factor in development,' he said. 'The bigger the loan, the more the risk, and the poor are a better risk than the rich. They have more integrity.'

Bussau had left an orphanage at the age of 15 and started work in a hot-dog stand and then in a circus. 'God can use those from humble beginnings just as much as those with a PhD,' he commented. At 35, after working in 15 industries he had 'reached the economics of enough', and felt he had a calling to help others. God-given talents should be used for the benefit of others, he said.

He and his wife and two small children had spent three years living simply in the Indonesian jungle where he worked on developing infrastructure and 'where my cheque book was of no use at all'. There, he had seen how the poor remained poor because many were in the hands of loan sharks who demanded up to 20 per cent interest per day. Children, even the unborn, had been used as collateral for loans. Driven by this experience, he had launched OI which has since mobilized the support of successful Christian businessmen around the world. It aimed always to employ first-class managers.

Eighty-five per cent of OI's clients were women: 'Women are more responsible than men,' he said bluntly. 'They want to feed their children and families.' Many families fragmented partly due to economic reasons and 'if we don't build strong families, we won't have strong societies'. One typical example of a small loan in the Philippines had led to the creation of 128 jobs in a small business. One dollar a day, the cost of a daily newspaper, over a year could help create such jobs, Bussau said. While it was up to governments to create the appropriate environment for job creation, 'it is vibrant commerce that will create the jobs,' he concluded.2

Swiss businessman Jackie Brandt told how he runs his family business, a metal working factory which makes wrought iron gates, 'on the basis of honesty and equality'. He meets regularly with his employees to discuss the business, both its strategy and shop floor practices. After three years as Director, following his father's retirement in 1971, he had thought the business should diversify into aluminium products. This not only seemed to make sound business sense but was also a way for Brandt to make his mark on the company. But the employees advised Brandt against his plan. He listened and accepted their expertise. Three years later, during the Middle East oil price hike, many of his competitors who had diversified into aluminium went bust. Brandt now says that his motivation comes not only from his business sense but also from his 'yearning for the truth'.

Those at the beginning of their working lives came to the 1998 conference to learn from such experiences, and discuss their own problems. Anastasia Antsoupova, a 22-year-old director of a company importing car parts in Novosibirsk, central Russia, said she saw the need to practice 'gymnastics of the spirit' in order to keep the human skills of integrity and honesty, which were essential in dealing with employees, suppliers and customers.

Bruce Myer, a young American financial worker, said he found that ethics versus personal opportunity could be a hard choice--the kind that most of those making their way in business will have to grapple with. Often people don't speak out so as not to rock the boat and maintain their career prospects, he said. He hoped that the discussions he had had in the Junior Round Table (a CCBI forum) would help him to make the right choices in life.

The accumulation of business experience, such as the stories presented here, has given the industry conferences in Caux their credibility, says Christopher Evans, CCBI co-ordinator from 1986-1999, who is also Treasurer of MRA in Britain. 'It is no use talking about ethics if they are not firmly rooted in the experiences of business, employees and professionals,' he says.

Evans grew up on his family's farm and estate at Whitbourne, Herefordshire. He feels he is lucky never to have been short of anything materially. But he also recalls a certain 'over-comfort' and lack of a sense of purpose as he grew up. A visit to India at the age of 19, and seeing its poverty, had a profound effect on him and led him to his calling in life. Ever since, he says, his aim has been to 'help the poor of the world to help themselves to reach out of the poverty trap'. This led him not to the slums of Calcutta but towards tackling the sources of the world's inequality--the distribution of wealth and opportunity through business and the global economy. In recent years he has taken part in forums on values for the market economy in Novosibirsk, Russia, and he sees the direction that the Russian economy takes as being crucial to the world's future.

Meanwhile the CCBI has begun working in partnership with an international 'Hope in the Cities' coalition, in the recognition that business has a responsibility for tackling social exclusion and unemployment, especially in multiracial and multiethnic urban environments. The aim, say the organizers, is to 'reinforce the kind of inclusive partnerships and relationships that are effective and sustainable in creating opportunities for employment and development'.

1. See cover story, Time Magazine, 28 September 1998.

2. For a fuller account of Bussau's life, see 'A talent for job creation' by John Williams, For A Change magazine, April/May 1999.

See also the report on the CCBI by Sandy Hore-Ruthven, For A Change magazine, October/November 1998, from which much of this chapter is taken.