Considering how this is a dog eat dog world, is it truly possible to run a successful business ethically & morally?

Firstly, you need to know why you start the company in the first place. For the most part, money is likely to be one of the reasons and probably a measurement for success. At least let's assume it to be so at the beginning.

Once your business is on the right track and is making money, what's next? At this point, the goal may be to expand and monopolise the market. This is when we get bored of dollar and cents and is now after power.

In order to do, we exhaust all techniques to beat competitors and become the dominant force in the market today. Now, what's next?

We look back and realise that we are exhausted from the sprint to make money and gain power and have forgetten the need to be happy. For the most part, happiness should not be tagged to anything. In fact, it should be a standalone variable that is free from everything.

So what should we do? Focus on the right set of values that money cannot buy. Lose in a gracious manner but earns the respect from the crowd. In the long run, people buy people and will naturally help you when they know you are kind.

Will try to provide my two cents, given that I run an organization that pushes start-ups to solve sustainability related challenges.

Generally, the function of any company is two fold; understanding your value creation, and understanding how you are doing your value capture. So long as you understand specifically what value you're creating, understanding that you're playing by the rules when capturing value (e.g. understanding and obeying laws and regulations), you already have your first base covered.

Then there's the matter of your shareholders and other stakeholders (e.g. partners, suppliers, employees etc.) that you answer to. Then it becomes more a game of what matters to you, and really optimizing your efforts towards making those ideals or principles a reality. It's hard, but if you think about it, being completely amoral also has the spillover effect of angering a stakeholder, so at the end of the day, more than thinking about your morals and ethics being a crutch, it actually grounds you and provides you a proper compass to allow you to develop proper heuristics when faced with a difficult decision.

Also, in the Singaporean context, we're particularly lucky that corruption is not widespread at all, and it's actually one of the safer playing grounds to try starting a business. Things are much much more grey in the rest of the region (and as an individual actor, your job is not to ensure everyone's morality anyway; it's a complex world, there are always going to be actors that will want to find ways to make things more fair overall, and they can come from governments or non-profits or other companies), but without your morals, it's really gonna be hard on you because you don't particularly know where you belong. So choose a set, understand why you chose it, and stick to it. (or don't, not trying to tell you how to live your life).

Also, if you want to know more specific details on how businesses might be able to do good, I created a deck on social enterprise in Singapore sometime late in 2019: http://bit.ly/ysisea-social2019 . Hope you'll find it interesting!