Don't Be Evil

The founders of Google have a motto, "Don't be evil." There are people who have good intentions, and want to make a lot of money. But there are also people with bad intentions that want to make a lot of money. The latter are the people being evil.

When I was in college, I ran into a high school friend, Jason, who said he invented some kind of device that would allow people to make long distance phone calls for free. I had no idea if the product actually worked, but I wanted no part of anything that involved fraud. Jason was evil.

I met a guy a few years ago, Matthew, that started taking photographs just so he could date amateur models. The photos were a hardly portfolio worthy, but the models didn't know any better. He basically took advantage of these poor girls. Mathew was evil.

There was a guest on the Dr. Phil Show whose family was going into bankruptcy. The father refuses to get a job, and has invested tons of money on many failing business ideas. His latest idea was selling some kind of license plate screen that would obscure the license plate numbers if you happened to run a red light that was monitored with red-light photo cameras. I don't know about you, but considering how many traffic accidents are caused by red-light runners, I would categorize this product as being evil.

You don't have to be scam artist that swindle couples out of their retirement money in order to be considered evil. You don't have to run a Ponzi scheme in order to be considered evil. You don't have work for a banking firm and create financial weapons of mass destruction that drive our economy into the ground just be considered evil. All it takes to be evil is the intent of taking people's money and giving them something of less value in return.

Is your business evil?