Downloads: Code of Ethics – Our Values
A Message from Jerry Thermos, President, Marine Fenders International, Inc.
Like many businesses today, Marine Fenders International, Inc faces many challenges in our marine fender, buoy, and other marine products businesses from competition, rapidly changing energy and raw material costs, transportation costs, and environmental regulations.
Our company is growing stronger, our business volumes are drastically increasing year over year, and we are poised to flourish. We have learned a lot about ourselves, the loyalty of our distributors and customers, and our abilities to overcome obstacles. Last year, we began to reflect on the underlying values that have served us well, formed the foundation of our recent success, and could be our guiding principles for our future actions.
We have always wanted to “do the right thing” but wanting and doing are two different things. It takes resolve and commitment and reinforcement to live up to values. So, we embarked on an ethics initiative to make Marine Fenders International the kind of organization that supports our employees as they put their values in action—encouraging them to openly discuss ethical issues and backing them when the right thing to do is not easy to do.
We have formalized our values, created a code of conduct, conducted formal training sessions, sought feedback and discussion from everyone within Marine Fenders International, and have involved many of our agents, and distributors. We want them to buy into our focus on “doing the right thing,” support our efforts, and act consistently with our shared values.
We understand that this is not a one-shot deal, and will require ongoing attention, training, and experience. Our goal is to continually improve our actions—ethics is what you do, not just what you say– and our reputation for being a highly ethical organization. I invite all of Marine Fenders International’s stakeholders—internal and external– to participate and, most importantly, to give us feedback on how we are doing!
“We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly”
Aristotle 384 B.C.-322 B.C. / Greek Philosopher and Scientist, Student of Plato and the Teacher of Alexander the Great