Recently, I had a great conversation with Patrick Byers, President & CEO, Outsource Marketing, about ethical marketing. The subject is what brought us together.

Although we live on opposite coasts, we believe that marketing and business must be built on a foundation of ethics and values and driven by authenticity. In other words, our ethics and values aren’t discussion points, they are the way we live our lives and run our businesses. I call it leading with your heart, which means we always put people first in every decision we make, and everything we do is based on making the world a better place to live and work. What might that look like?

• When we lead with the heart, we act green. In other words, we do such things as recycling, telecommuting and installing energy-efficient lighting in our homes and workplaces.
• We act ethically. We never tell a version of the truth; we never spin; and we ever-better produce products and services designed to meet people’s wants and needs, not ours.
• We hold our values close to our heart. Not only do we create a value statement in our business, we live those values by filtering every business and personal decision through them.
• We do no harm. We do the vetting and research to ensure products are safe before we put them into the marketplace.
• We measure the size of our environmental footprint. We begin with our present state and work toward a future state that reduces our footprint.
• We become a business that not only cares about people but people care about our business. Business is people-centered. People come before profit in every instance.
• Our business understands the wants, needs, and desires of it employees and its customers.
• It creates products, services, value, prices, and most important, an experience that meets or exceeds people’s wants, needs, and desires.

In conclusion, leading with your heart puts people first, ahead of profits and margins and revenues. It always is about the "who," not the "what." No business that strategizes around making people happy by giving them a voice will experience less wealth, if leaders lead by walking the talk and eliminate manager and management from their vocabulary. Instead of managing, invest all employees with the responsibility to be held accountable for success around putting customers and communities ahead of all else, and watch employee innovation and creativity grow like Topsy.

Recent research indicates the power of business to do good and inversely to do harm. Although the research results published by Gretchen Spreitzer in the November 2007 issue of the "Journal of Organizational Behavior" are preliminary, they suggest a link between workplace changes and societal changes. A professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, Spreitzer reports that "satisfied employees tend to live in open, peaceful societies--and that improvements in workplace empowerment often precede social changes."

Why? Because employees transfer lessons learned in the workplace to their social and political lives.

In the simplest sense, we are talking about building relationships and communities around our employees and the products and services they produce. When business works on this model, it becomes the best hope to save the world.