One of the myriad issues which deserve to be addressed urgently by corporate India is business ethics or best practices. Many a time, business ethics is treated as a new subject. In fact, it is not new, but the newness refers to the development of the discipline. As an academic subject, it has come of age after the Wall Street scandals of the 1980s. This period of greed shocked many observers and prompted them to think about the kind of managers being developed. In India, people started talking about ethics after the stock scams and the collapse of cooperative banks. The reasons attributed for their fall are lack of ethics and misgovernance. This paper discusses the need for having a code of ethics, areas where ethics should be set and the manner in which they have to be adopted. It also discusses about ensuring ethical behavior in organizations. A company needs to define the code of ethics with respect to consumers, shareholders, HRD practices, product quality, intentional product obsolescence, environment, performance of boards, remuneration of board members, etc. Code of best practices or code of ethics in any organization cannot be evolved unilaterally by the management. In order to be accepted by the entire organization, people need to be involved.The practice of providing ethics training helps in institutionalizing ethical behavior. Further, for an ethical code to be credible, an organization must be willing to discipline any employee found guilty of a breach. Providing avenues for debates on issues and generating feedback on the working of the code will help in bringing about a solution to this problem.

The standard of business practices, which are deep rooted in the environment and the nature of the business, vary across the globe. While culture is a part of the environment, `business ethics' is culture bound. Integration of the world economies calls for a new set of ethics for the business organizations though they have their ancestry in the culture of the host nation. Globalization also calls for transparency in business practices, which are not prone to scams. There is also the need to have a tradeoff between culture bound ethics and uniform practices across the globe. In this context, it may be of interest to understand the concept of business ethics, how the code of best practices evolves from business ethics and the perceptions of the business community about such practices.

Putting Business Ethics in Practice: Some Issues, business ethics, misgovernance, shareholders, HRD practices, product quality, intentional product obsolescence, environment, business practices, business ethics, Globalization, business community.