Many small businesses are saddled with a very familiar problem. How do you find good employees? For business this seems to be an age old question. A question that seems to have a great deal of answers but no real solutions.

Hiring a good employee can be a hit or miss proposition. Hopefully though once you have gained some experience and learned from your mistakes your percentage of good hires will rise.

In life, "Truth matters", to quote one of my favorite leaders ever, a former General Counsel with whom I worked. If you are like most people and want to sleep well at night, stay off the slippery slope. When an alarm bell rings in your mind, listen to it! It probably sounded off for a reason. Pausing to consider why the alarm went off ensures you will take time to reconsider the situation from an ethical point of view.

You have probably heard of examples of behavior at work that seem unbelievable. Imagine a case where an employee in a landscaping business is found to have been ordering extra plants and other supplies from a vendor to use at their home and their families' homes. You think to yourself, and maybe have conversations with co-workers, "WHAT was she thinking?" It is an interesting question.

Too many offers of guaranteed income or of projected income can be found online these days. When someone is scouring the internet for job announcements or possibly with the intent of starting a business, the number of business opportunities that pop up is growing quite large. These offers are sometimes not in compliance with business opportunity law specifications.

In 2002 the Sarbanes Oxley Act was passed into federal law after the American nation was shocked by scandals that rocked large businesses from Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia to name a few. These scandals all related to businesses and firms using insider trading to get ahead resulting in the loss of share value to many individual investors and drastically reducing the American's faith in trading and investing in the stock market in general, but most noticeably in the securities market as they were all centered on businesses there.

You can find various business ethics quizzes around thPick the one answer you think is wrong. This one is different. Each question has only one WRONG answer, doesn't analyze your answers and tell you where you went wrong. Rather, it is simply intended to raise your ethical consciousness, maybe even stimulate a little discussion between you and your peers or family.

Each of us carries around within us a personal code of ethics. We may not be conscious of it; we may not deliberately consult it on a daily basis, we may not apply a decision tree against it to make a choice, but it exists. And, at times, it may falter, or we may apply different ethical principles in different situations.

Take a minute to identify your fundamental ethical philosophy.

The pressures people face as entrepreneurs can at times become burdensome. You are the boss, the one person within your company that is ultimately responsible for everything that goes on. Sometimes you may feel all alone in the world that makes up your life. And sometimes the pressure can seem overwhelming. Being in business for yourself does not mean living in a perfect world.

Business ethics is an interesting branch of business theory, primarily because of the fact that they are inherently interesting in a market economy. People tend to be extremely distrustful of corporations in market economies and the bigger they are, the worse that problem of trust usually gets. Business ethics therefore are politically charged in many different circumstances and that in turn serves to make them interesting.

Integrity in business, especially on the internet, seems to be a quality that, unfortunately, is rarely found nowadays. The internet marketing world has become so glutted with hype, scams and empty promises that even the most trusting of us have become skeptical about the claims we're subjected to on a daily basis. So when we find a company or a person with real integrity, we're impressed, and much more likely to do business with them.