Core Principles in

Business Operations

SLIDE 1
 Fairness
 Fairness refers to the level of even-handedness in
dispensing in justice whereby claims are recognized in the
order if their legal and contractual priority.
 Justice means giving each person what he or she deserves
or, in more traditional terms, giving each person his or her
due.
 Justice and fairness are closely related terms that are
often today used interchangeably.
Different Kinds of Justice
 Distributive Justice refers to the extent to
which society’s institutions ensure that
benefits and burdens are distributed among
society’s members in ways that are fair and
just.
 When the institutions of a society distribute
benefits or burdens in unjust ways, there is a
strong presumption that those institutions
should be changed.
 Retributive or Corrective Justice refers to
the extent to which punishments are fair and
just.
 In general, punishments are held to be just to

the extent that they take into account

relevant criteria such as seriousness of the
crime and the intent of the criminal, and
discount irrelevant criteria such as race.
 Compensatory Justice refers to the
extent to which people are fairly
compensated for their injuries by those
who have injured them; just compensation
is proportional to the loss inflicted in a
person.
Accountability
 Accountability is the obligation of an individual or
organization to account for its activities, accept
responsibility for them, and to disclose the results in a
transparent manner. In also includes the responsibility
for money or other entrusted property.
 In organizations, accountability is a management
control process in which response are given for a
person’s actions. These responses can be positive or
negative. Depending on the response, the person
might need to correct his or her error. In other words,
accountability refers to the individual responsibility
for the work performed and answering to peers and
superiors for performance.
 Corporate Accountability refers to the act of
being accountable to the stakeholders of an
organization, which may include shareholders,
employees, suppliers, customers, the local
community, and even the particular country(s)
that the firm operates in. In most jurisdictions, a
body of corporate law has been developed in
order to formalize these requirements.
 Accountability is often used synonymously with
responsibility, blameworthiness, and liability. As
an aspect if governance, accountability has been
central to discussions related to problems in the
public, non-profit and corporate sectors.
Transparency
 Transparency refers to the lack of hidden agendas
and conditions, accompanied by the availability of full
information required for collaboration, cooperation,
and collective decision making. It refers also to the
minimum degree of disclosure to which agreements,
dealings, practices, and transactions are open to all
for verification.
 Transparency is the essential condition for a free and
open exchange whereby the rules and reasons behind
regulatory measure are fair and clear to all
participants. Transparency means unimpeded visibility
as all transactions are subject to scrutiny.
 Corporate Transparency describes the extent to which
a corporation’s actions are observable by outsiders. This
is a consequence of regulation, local norms, and the set
of information, privacy, and business policies concerning
corporate decision-making and operations openness to
employees, stakeholders, shareholders, and the general
public. From the perspective of outsiders, transparency
can be defined simply as the perceived quality of
intentionally shared information from the corporation.
 Transparency, in a business or governance context, is
honestly and openness. Transparency and accountability
are generally considered the two main pillars of good
corporate governance.
Stewardship
 Stewardship was originally made up of the tasks of a
domestic steward, from stig (house, hall) and
weard, (ward, guard, guardian, keeper).
Stewardship, in the beginning, referred to the
household, servant’s duties for bringing food and
drink to the castle’s dinning hall.
 Stewardship is an ethic that embodies the
responsible planning and management of resources.
The concepts of stewardship can be applied to the
environment and nature, economics, health,
property, information, theology, etc.