Price fixing costs Bayer $33 million. Martha Stewart is in prison. What or who is next in the "unethics" pipeline? By now, we know more is there.

"This is a very rough-and-tumble country where the emphasis on success has been more important than the emphasis on morality." So observes David Callahan, author of "The Cheating Culture." Near daily accounts of corporate ethics problems lend weight to Callahan's point.

But cheating and "unethics" are not limited to corporations and the privileged. The IRS estimates the tax gap -- money that should be coming to the government but is not -- at $250 billion annually. The number of people who believe it is OK to cheat on their income tax increased from 8 percent to 12 percent on the most recent IRS survey. Sick leave abuse at US Airways is estimated to cost the struggling airline $1 million per year. It is hard to conclude from this that ethical behavior is getting better.

Looking out for No. 1 is human nature, but continuously gaming the system to succeed unethically raises important questions.

Is looking out for No. 1 just the way we imperfect humans behave, or can we raise the bar and behave more ethically?

Is victory in this morality war simply keeping our not-so-good scorecard from getting worse?

Does business, with all of its performance pressures, have to increase its commitment to the fight?

Ethical behavior is rooted in a person's values. For better or for worse, our values, our sense of what is right and what is not are forged by institutions: family, school, organized religion. What we see leaders and others do also counts.

The hourly worker at a General Electric plant may not debate too long the ethical dilemma of "borrowing" a small tool or cheating on an income tax return when he or she reads that former CEO Jack Welch received country club memberships, an apartment in Trump Tower, and many other perks from the GE board, all of this in addition to a $9 million annual pension. Despite all of his business acumen, Welch failed ethics leadership. Yet, if the hourly worker's value foundation is strong, he or she will neither steal the tool nor cheat on the income tax return.

We are unlikely to achieve our potential as a society if we don't work to reverse "unethics" or if we accept "keeping the scorecard from getting any worse" as success. The potential cost and public relations damage, by themselves, should make raising the ethical bar a business mandate. As usual, businesses have responded by rewriting codes of conduct, revisiting values statements, putting sharper teeth into penalties for ethical misconduct and training employees -- all valuable tactics in sustaining an ethical culture.

But is it enough to raise the bar? To attain an even better balance of morality and success, business leaders may have to elevate ethical behavior to a measure of success equal to traditional performance measures such as sales, net profit, return on investment, and others.

It may take awhile to refine these, but measures such as number of unethical incidents, number of customers lost due to unethical activity, number of employees released or disciplined because of unethical behavior and funds spent to pay for ethical misconduct can be documented and made into objectives. Success is the number zero. Businesses are good at management by objective and process improvement. Applying these is how they can increase their commitment to raising the ethics performance bar.

Boards of directors also have to demand more than a vanilla statement in the CEO's introduction to the annual report. They should direct the CEO to develop measures and report on ethical performance as they require reporting on other performance measures.

Compensation committees should be cautious that rewards to CEOs and senior management teams aren't so lucrative that they may encourage executive decision making that is more compensation driven than strategically driven. Out-of-balance rewards to the Jack Welches and Richard Grassos don't help. These may be legal, but, given the interests of employees, retirees and stockholders, they're hard to justify as ethical.

The CEO and senior managers have to actively lead ethical behavior, elevating it from a desired outcome to a process of continuous improvement in which they set objectives, work to improve, measure results, reset objectives, work to improve and measure again in the same sequence that good businesses continuously improve manufacturing, quality and sales/administrative processes. The mechanics are in place.

Management by objective and process improvement have been very successful as management tactics. When ethical performance becomes a business goal supported by objectives and a continuous improvement process, the ethical behavior bar may start to move higher, little by little. In turn, this may trickle down to individual behavior beyond business hours and help reverse the disturbing trend of overemphasizing success at the expense of morality.