Ian’s appointment to the role of director at the Institute of Business Ethics (IBE) came at a turbulent time, both for the IBE and for businesses and individuals generally.

Joining in May 2020, when much of the world was experiencing Covid lockdowns, he says that a significant and ongoing challenge of his tenure has been to keep ‘ethics’ – or rather, the issue of ethical business practice – top of the agenda for the owners of businesses and organisations the IBE works closely with. “The big challenge has been to capture people’s attention when everybody’s been focused on what is actually survival,” he explains, adding that, from a business and organisational perspective, “we’ve all been through a very challenging period.”

With the Covid lockdowns barely over before the Russian invasion of Ukraine brought further widespread economic disruption and “turmoil” for governments, businesses, and individuals alike, this central challenge has continued for Ian and the IBE. However, in Ian’s view, these consecutive major global crises have brought the importance of ethics in business into even sharper focus. “I am passionate about ethics in business,” he says. “I care about the way we treat each other and the planet, and I think it’s important that business cares just as much.”

Dr Ian Peters MBE

2020 – present: Director, Institute of Business Ethics

2009–2019: Chief executive, Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors

2008–2009: Director, I Peters Consulting

2001–2008: Director, external affairs and marketing, Engineering Employers Federation

1996-2001: Deputy director-general, British Chambers of Commerce

1991–1996: Deputy director, small and medium enterprise, Confederation of British Industry

1989–1991: Account director, Burson-Marsteller

1989: Achieved PhD in Small Business Growth (spatial and non-spatial aspects of development), Southampton University

1984–1989: Assistant then head of smaller firms policy, Confederation of British Industry

But Ian also firmly believes that ethical business not only makes for good business but also has the best chance of winning the support of stakeholders. “If an organisation keeps a laser focus on where it’s going, what it’s trying to achieve and the values that enable it to achieve that, then it’s more likely to bring people with it,” he says.

Ian joined the IBE because “its purpose closely aligns with [his] own values”. His priority is to develop the IBE as a key partner for businesses wanting to develop and maintain an ethical culture, and to increase awareness in the business community of why an ethical culture is valuable and the steps needed to achieve it.

At the coalface

A large part of Ian’s role involves working with organisations, both at senior level and with “the people on the ground” on the development of ethics programmes to help them formulate clear statements of purpose and establish values that foster an ethical culture. A key part of the process, he says, involves stakeholders asking themselves introspective questions such as ‘What would my family think if they knew I was making this decision? What would happen if everybody decided to do this? How would I feel if I read about my decision in the newspapers tomorrow?’

This questioning approach is fundamental to Ian’s work with the CISI – he is a regular contributor to the ethical dilemmas we publish for our members and panellists to analyse, discuss, and reflect upon. He says these ethical dilemmas use made-up yet realistic examples to get people thinking about the ethical issues they and their organisations face. “This reinforces that objective of getting people to behave in the right way,” he explains, adding that outlining a dilemma helps the individuals concerned to see scenarios from different perspectives.

"How would I feel if I read about my decision in the newspapers tomorrow?" For Ian, integrity and openness are inextricably linked in an ethical organisational culture, and related to transparency is a willingness of leadership to listen to all stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and local communities. Such a culture would also “consider the impact that it has on the environment as a whole, as well as the people in it,” he says.

New perspectives

Ian has always been interested in why some places seem to be more successful in growing businesses and creating jobs than others, and the role that small businesses play in job generation. This curiosity led him, for three months in 1981, to join Kibbutz Beeri in Israel. He wanted to learn more about the cooperative model of the kibbutz, where everyone shares the work and the profits, and to understand if this model was transferable to other situations. Located close to the Gaza Strip, Ian took the opportunity to visit Gaza City and talk to Palestinian and Israeli citizens. "It was a fascinating experience,” he says. “Not only did I learn about the kibbutz way of life but also about the history of Israel and the Palestinian–Israeli conflict … I learned much about cooperation and conflict in these contrasting environments.”

He subsequently began work on a PhD (awarded by Southampton University in 1989), focusing on the role of small and medium-sized enterprises in generating jobs, and the factors that lead to some business owners forging companies that grow and provide employment, while others remain self-employed one-man bands. He wanted to identify what distinguished the 5–6% of small businesses that achieve high growth from the majority that do not, and says he “discovered a few characteristics” of those that grow, including:

• a tendency to be market-led, rather than product-led, meaning they were founded after having identified a market opportunity as opposed to a product idea
• they were often led by serial entrepreneurs, who’d had previous experience of setting up and running businesses and therefore had the skills to run a successful enterprise, and
• they were led by people who gathered a good team around them, who could support them to drive the business forward.

Manufacturing success

Ian’s championing of small businesses and their founders then led him to a role at the British Chambers of Commerce (see CV boxout for more detail on previous roles and achievements), where he focused largely on “ensuring policies were delivered that would help small businesses grow and prosper in the economy”, then to the Engineering Employers Federation, where he was appointed director of external affairs. “That was all about promoting manufacturing and engineering,” he says. “Everybody was saying, ‘We’re now a service economy. We don’t make anything anymore.’ But the UK is still a significant manufacturer.”

Ian’s next career move brought with it a further shift in focus, this time towards the importance of ethics in business. In 2009, he was appointed chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors – “a very different role”, he says. Initially, he was not convinced that the job would be for him, expecting it to be “about bean counting”. But his reservations proved unfounded.
"Don’t worry about looking stupid, because somebody else is probably thinking of the same question but is too afraid to ask"

“It’s not about the numbers, it’s essentially about risk,” he explains. “And one of the key things that causes risks is people behaving badly. In other words, a lack of integrity. And that’s all about culture.” Ian’s realisation that “the sort of culture we need in an organisation is an ethical one that is based around ethical values” made many aspects of his career until that point fall into place, crystallising for him the idea that an organisation’s impact on its people and the planet, coupled with a sense of purpose that goes beyond profit, is part and parcel of its success.

Don’t be afraid to ask

Asked what advice he would give to a person embarking on a career in financial services, Ian’s response is perhaps unsurprising. “Ask lots of questions,” he says. “Don’t worry about looking stupid, because somebody else is probably thinking of the same question but is too afraid to ask.”