Every community develops its own definition of moral code. In hip-hop, where street ethics shaped ideas of loyalty, “snitching“ was considered a greater offense than murder, a reminder that right and wrong are often defined by the values of the community itself.
I thought about this recently during a debate in my community over a couple and their business practices within our creative ecosystem. Both the comment section on a post and my personal DMs were flooded with people trying to negotiate, understand, or define where the ethical lines had been crossed
As I reflected on those conversations, I realized I wasn’t just trying to define what bad business looked like. I was trying to raise the standard by showing people what good business could look like.
So rather than define every behavior that contributes to “bad business,” I posed a different question to my community: Who comes to mind when you think of good business?
I received dozens of responses, but three names surfaced repeatedly. They were also people I’d consistently heard praised through the grapevine: Jashima Wadehra, Hiba Irshad and Faisal Lateef.
Wadehra is the founder of Ode, a brand strategist, artist manager, and Recording Academy member. She has represented artists including Rashmeet Kaur and Ramya Pothuri, consulted on SXSW programming, and led multiple South Asian songwriting camps with Amazon, becoming a leading advocate for South Asian artists within the music industry.
Irshad, a former JioSaavn executive and founder of 25percent, an agency spanning South Asian media, entertainment, brands, and culture, is known for hosting New York's annual Eid Gala, one of the city's most diverse and sought-after events.
Lateef, an entertainment lawyer and former head of legal at Avant Gardner, represents many entertainers and South Asian businesses in New York, including the DJ collective Indo Warehouse and the restaurant Madam Ji.
I spoke with each of them separately, but every conversation began with the same question:
What is good business?
*The responses below have been condensed and synthesized for clarity.
“Good business, to me, is when both parties understand exactly what they are getting, and exactly what they are giving,” Wadehra answered.
Irshad kept it simple: “I think it’s about doing net good.”
“It all comes down to genuine partnerships and being non-exploitative,” Lateef emphasized.
Although multiple people had identified all three as examples of “good business,” none of them defined it the same way. But despite their differing perspectives, one theme kept resurfacing: intention.
For Wadehra, good business begins with clear communication. Agreements should be transparent, mutually understood, and free from power dynamics that prevent genuine consent. Beyond that, she believes every business relationship should leave room for grace.
Irshad agreed that business can be gray, but argued that responsibility doesn’t end once someone says yes. Consent without understanding isn’t an informed choice. If we want to build community, information can’t become another form of gatekeeping.
Lateef repeatedly returned to one idea: good business isn’t where one person makes money and disappears; it’s a relationship built on mutual value, where both sides understand and benefit from the exchange.
The second question I asked each of them was where their ethics came from.
For Wadehra, the answer came from her mother's teachings, informed by Sikh values and practice. She spoke about langar, the tradition in gurdwaras where anyone, regardless of background, faith, class, or circumstance, can walk in and be fed.
As a child, she asked her mother a question, the answer to which, she told us, stayed with her.
“If someone hurt you, would I still have to feed them?”
Her mother’s answer was simple: if you believe hungry people should be fed, you don’t get to make exceptions for people you dislike. Otherwise, your morals are conditional.
A lot of people have morals when it’s convenient. They believe in fairness until they have leverage. They believe in community until they can profit from someone’s lack of knowledge. They believe in grace until they’re the ones who’ve been wronged.
Wadehra’s ethics didn’t come from business school. They came from a spiritual practice that demands consistency.
For Irshad, the answer came from her parents.
She described her father, a physician, as someone who viewed medicine as service, taking calls even when he wasn’t on call, helping people understand their medical care even when there was nothing to gain financially.
She also spoke of the way her parents treated anyone who worked in their home. If the family was eating, that person was eating. If someone quoted a price and her parents believed they deserved more, they paid more.
That upbringing shaped the way Irshad approaches business.
When she says she doesn’t believe in free labor, it isn’t branding or a performative statement. It’s inherited. It’s the way she was taught to move through the world.
For Lateef, his ethics came from his parents, his South Asian upbringing, and his identity as a creator long before he became a lawyer.
He didn’t become a lawyer and then discovered entertainment. He loved music first. He spent time around artists first. He created it first. Building a legal career around protecting creative work came later.
That perspective shapes the way he practices law. To him, exploitation isn’t an abstract concept, he understands what it feels like to create something and have others treat that creation as nothing more than a transaction. His answer wasn’t legal. It was personal.
The third question was about examples.
Where did their idea of good business actually show up?
For Wadehra, one story involved walking away from a client relationship that became verbally abusive. She and her then co-founder had already gone above and beyond, navigating missing logins, contractors, and unclear infrastructure. When a deadline shifted because the client hadn’t provided what was needed, the client responded with hostility.
She made a decision.
It’s okay to be dissatisfied. It’s okay for a business relationship to end. It’s okay to disagree. It is never okay to threaten, scream at, curse, or abuse someone over a deliverable.
For Wadehra, the story wasn't simply about leaving a difficult client. It was about refusing to normalize behavior that weakens an entire creative ecosystem. Too often, communities overlook harmful conduct when money, influence, or opportunity are involved. To her, ethics only matter if they remain consistent, even when upholding them comes at a cost. Good business sometimes means walking away, not because it's easy, but because every compromise teaches a community what it's willing to tolerate.
For Irshad, one of the clearest examples is her annual Eid Gala.
To her, the Eid Gala isn’t just a party, it’s an attempt to create the kind of institutional support Muslim celebrations have historically lacked. While other cultural holidays routinely receive brand investment and mainstream recognition, Eid has often been viewed as too religious, too niche, or too difficult to support.
So she built the room.
Not because it was easy or immediately profitable, but because she believed Muslim and South Asian communities deserved the same level of beauty, care, and investment afforded to others.
She also acknowledged the tension around curation. Some viewed the event as exclusive. Irshad saw curation differently. To her, it isn’t exclusion for the sake of status, it’s how you build a room with purpose.
She doesn’t pretend business decisions are simple. Brand partnerships are complicated. Capitalism is complicated. Rather than chasing perfect alignment, she asks a different question: Does this create more good than harm? Does it expand opportunity? Does it help build something that didn’t exist before?
That’s what she means by net good.
For Lateef, the clearest example came from his time at Avant Gardner.
Before Indo Warehouse became what it is today, Lateef advocated internally for the collective to have a platform. At the time, South Asian dance music wasn’t the obvious investment it may seem like now. The space remained largely Eurocentric, and programming like this wasn’t expected.
There were no guarantees the event would succeed and no obvious personal benefit.
But if he was one of the few South Asians in the room, he believed access only mattered if he used it to create more access for others.
To me, that’s one of the clearest definitions of good business.
Access used responsibly.
After speaking with all three, I realized good business isn’t one thing.
For Wadehra, it’s clarity, comprehension, and grace.
For Irshad, it’s responsibility, informed choice, and net good.
For Lateef, it’s partnership, non-exploitation, and advocacy.
But beneath all three answers was the same principle.
Good business isn’t simply about whether someone agreed to something.
It’s about whether that agreement was fair.
It isn’t simply about whether money changed hands.
It’s about whether value was exchanged.
It isn’t simply about whether something was legal.
It’s about whether it was right.
In a community where business is built on relationships, culture, trust, and access, that distinction matters.
Our community is still building its institutions: media companies, creative agencies, law firms, management firms, festivals, restaurants, and production houses. The norms shaping those institutions aren’t inevitable. They’re created by the people we reward, the behavior we excuse, and the standards we choose to uphold.
So maybe the question isn’t simply, What is good business?
Maybe the better question is: Who do we want setting the standard?
If bad business spreads through silence, then good business has to spread through recognition.
We have to name it.
We have to study it.
We have to point to the people doing it well and say: this is what it looks like.
Good business looks like Wadehra understanding that clarity is care.
It looks like Irshad understanding that community requires responsibility.
It looks like Lateef understanding that access means very little if you don’t use it to open doors.
Good business isn’t perfection.
It isn’t purity.
It isn’t always clean.
But it is intentional.
It is consistent.
It recognizes power.
It recognizes information gaps.
Most of all, it recognizes that people are more than deliverables, invoices, or opportunities.
Good business isn’t something you get to call yourself.
It’s what people say about you when your name comes up in rooms you’re not in.
It’s the reputation you build through years of small decisions—when there’s something to gain, something to lose, and someone else’s trust in your hands.
Will there ever be a universal definition of good business?
Probably not.
Every community develops its own expectations, boundaries, and moral code. There will always be disagreement. There will always be gray areas.
But communities aren’t built on perfect consensus.
They’re built on repeated choices.
The South Asian creative economy is still writing that story. The agencies, law firms, media companies, festivals, management firms, production houses and brands we build today will become the institutions of tomorrow.
Institutional power is never built on talent alone. It’s built on trust, reputation, and hundreds of small decisions made when no one is watching, whether to communicate honestly, pay fairly, share information, create opportunity, or treat people as partners rather than transactions.
Those decisions become culture.
Culture becomes expectation.
Expectation becomes reputation.
And over time, reputation becomes the moral fabric of a community.
I don’t believe three interviews can define good business.
But I do believe communities have a responsibility to be intentional about the values they celebrate.
If bad business becomes normalized through silence, then good business must become normalized through recognition.
Because the moral code of a community isn’t inherited.
It’s written every day through the businesses we build, the deals we make, the people we advocate for and the standards we refuse to compromise.
The institutions of tomorrow are being shaped by the decisions we make today.
The question is no longer, What is good business?
The question is:
What kind of community are we building?