Cheating isn’t new, nor is my writing about it.

It probably dates back to the cavemen, but it’s become more acceptable with the passage of time. Or maybe it’s just that the level of cheating needed to upset people and the stakes involved have increased so much.

An article in the Sun Journal gives an excellent overview of the pervasiveness of cheating.

Of course, the best thing to do if you’re going to cheat is don’t get caught, but if you do and lie about it the penalties increase exponentially.

For some reason people are tolerant of the cheating, in some cases they even seem to expect it, but they go totally ballistic when they get denial and lies from the cheaters when they are caught.

Nixon and the Watergate tapes are a case in point. Dirty tricks in politics were nothing new; it was his blatant lying and lack of remorse that resulted in his impeachment.

When Nixon was up there denying that he edited the tapes and claiming to know nothing about it one thought kept going through my mind and my conversations, “How stupid does he thing we (the American people) are?” and that reaction hasn’t changed with any of the hundreds (thousands?) of accusation/proof/denial scenarios that have played out since, whether in politics, business, religion, sports or any other arena.

It takes a great deal from our so-called leaders to get a reaction beyond a shrug of disgust from me, probably because I have no-to-low expectations.

But treating me as if I am stupid will send me around the bend in no time flat.

I have no liking for Bernie Madoff, but at least he had the guts to plead guilty as opposed to Jeff Skilling, who added the cost of his trials and appeals to the rest of his fraud believing that we were too stupid to see/understand what he did.

The saddest part is the example these clowns set for younger generations.

What really happens to those like Nixon, Ebbers, Skilling, and all the lesser cheats?

Some serve a few months or years in jail; they might lose their “good name,” although that will fade in time, but they won’t be left destitute. Most go back to their old life; if they can’t do that they can always write a book, become a guest speaker or go on the talk show circuit.

The same actions that brought them down will serve to lift them up, so what’s the big deal?

As to the sports arena, another athlete on steroids or some other performance-enhancing drug is barely news these days.

“The Canadian sprinter stunned the world by running 100 meters in 9.79 seconds. Oops. Busted. Turned out Ben Johnson was the world’s fastest steroid abuser.

“How many athletes are using performance-enhancing substances? The answer is, everyone who’s willing to.” says Jay Coakley, author of Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies.

“Every athlete looks for an edge,” says Charles Maher, Cleveland Indians team psychologist. “Some are conflicted about it. They want a competitive advantage but they don’t want to damage themselves.”

With no real consequences in the vast majority of cases, and whatever penalties there are quickly forgotten, why not cheat?

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According to Donald McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, “95 percent of high school students say they’ve cheated during the course of their education, ranging from letting somebody copy their homework to test-cheating. There’s a fair amount of cheating going on, and students aren’t all that concerned about it.”

“The professor has been surveying cheating practices among college kids for 18 years and high school students for six years. He says he’s surveyed 24,000 high school students in 70,000 high schools, grades 9 to 12. His findings? Sixty-four percent of students report one or more instances of serious testing-cheating, which include copying from someone else, helping someone else cheat on a test, or using crib notes or cheat notes.

In 2002 17-year-old Alice Newhall was quoted in a CNN article on cheating, “What’s important is getting ahead. The better grades you have, the better school you get into, the better you’re going to do in life. And if you learn to cut corners to do that, you’re going to be saving yourself time and energy. In the real world, that’s what’s going to be going on. The better you do, that’s what shows. It’s not how moral you were in getting there.“”

Colleges are no different, with MBA students leading the pack. “56 percent of MBA students admitted to cheating…  In 1997, McCabe did a survey in which 84 percent of undergraduate business students admitted cheating versus 72 percent of engineering students and 66 percent of all students. In a 1964 survey by Columbia University, 66 percent of business students surveyed at 99 campuses said they cheated at least once.”

MBAs lead another pack; see if these names sound familiar: Jeff Skilling (MBA, Harvard). Joe Nacchio, (MBA, NYU), Richard Fuld, (MBA, Stern), John Thain, (MBA, Harvard), the list goes on and on.

Do you see a pattern here?

• It’s OK to cheat in high school to get good grades to gain entrance to a good college;
• it’s OK to cheat in college to gain entrance to a top grad school; and
• it’s OK to cheat in grad school to insure access to a good job, especially on Wall Street; so
• it must be OK once you’re working to cheat to improve your company’s bottom line.

Cheating is good business in its own right directly or in the sub-strata of plagiarism.

Google offers 1,620,000 results for “how to cheat in school,” 605,000 for “how to cheat on a test” and another 562,000 for “how to cheat on tests,” not to mention the more than 3,000 “how to cheat” videos on YouTube.

Meanwhile, on the plagiarism front, “school papers” returns a whopping 22,600,000 results.

Take a good look at the numbers and you’ll see that religion, spirituality and cheating seem to happily co-exist.

“The University of California at Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute reported that 80 percent of students show high degrees of religious commitment and spirituality. The new data comes from a survey conducted this past year involving 112,232 first year students attending 236 various colleges and universities.”

All the ethics courses, integrity lectures and moral preaching that go on aren’t likely to change decades of successful cheating—mainly because it works getting people where they want to go.

Cheating isn’t new, but the casual acceptance of it as a viable life strategy has radically changed.

So what do we do now?

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Raising kids is about teaching values, among other things, but kids learn by watching more than by listening. “Do as I say, not as I do” just doesn’t fly these days.

Cheating is not only a good example, it’s a global one.

Everyone knows that cheating is wrong, yet in US surveys 64% of high school students say they have cheated, while 84% of undergraduate business students and a whopping 56% of MBA students also admit to cheating. Not only is cheating prevalent, parental action often condones it.

Since many of these same parents are leaders in the workplace, the results of a McKinsey survey asking “which capabilities of organizations as a whole are most important for managing companies through the crisis” should come as no surprise.

Ability to shape employee interactions and foster a shared understanding of values.

Only 8% thought that important, which placed ‘shared values’ dead last on the list of nine.

What was first on the list? The item considered the most important?

Ability to ensure that leaders shape and inspire the actions of others to drive better performance.

Number two isn’t much of an improvement.

Capacity to articulate where the company is heading and how to get there, and to align people appropriately.

All the research I’ve seen claims that the best way to avoid ethical lapses is to have sustainable ethics embedded deep in the company’s culture.

And the comments of Rick Wartzman, director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, really resonate.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of the McKinsey findings is the suggestion that providing leadership is somehow separate from promoting values. In fact, the two are bound together—the double helix of any corporation’s DNA.

One would think that means the company’s leaders understand the value of values and would proactively work to foster and embed them.

But no, these leaders, likely the same one whose kids admit to cheating, believe that visions trump values.

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Last week I wrote that it seemed that change was in the wind for education and parental attitudes that have produced millions of poorly educated and entitled young people.

But it looks as if parents are still in the forefront of teaching their kids that there is no accountability and no consequences for actions such as cheating.

At Ohio’s Centerburg High, in the heartland of our country where, we are constantly told, ethics are at their highest, “so many of the senior class either cheated on final exams or knew about the cheating but failed to report it that district officials cancelled graduation.”

“Centerburg High, with about 400 students, is one of the state’s top schools, with an “excellent” academic rating last year, according to the state Department of Education. “Last year, the school had a 99% graduation rate, compared to a statewide rate of 87%.”

The cheating was the result of a senior hacking into a teacher’s computer, stealing the tests and distributing them to the entire class.

“Superintendent Dorothy Holden said the district had to take a stand and let students know that cheating can’t be tolerated… “We’re not going to put that type of honor out there knowing that many of you are walking through there and you cheated, you lied, you denied.”

According to Holden, “Some students admit they cheated; others said they knew of the cheating but didn’t participate; and others said they had the tests but didn’t use them. One student who used the test still failed.”

Three cheers for Dorothy Holden.

Of course, things didn’t end there.

“Some parents angry about the cancellation are organizing an unofficial graduation ceremony.”

Three thousand boos for those parents whose time would be better spent teaching their little darlings that lying and cheating aren’t nice.

Politicians and the media are rabid about the problems with school administrators and teachers and the public wrings its collective hands at the dismal state of US education.

But rarely do I read stories condemning the actions of parents for their active role in producing kids who can’t spell accountability and see nothing wrong with lying and cheating.

And before you say I’m being too hard on them remember that the parents are your colleagues and these are the kids you’ll be hiring—your workers, doctors, lawyers—and who, eventually, will lead our country, industry and social organizations.

Do you really think they’ll do things differently then?

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Today is National Honesty Day. Look it up and you’ll find lot of talk about being honest today.

You’d think people could manage one honest day a year, but it’s doubtful they actually will.

These days honesty seems to be more a matter of convenience, i.e., telling the truth when it doesn’t get in the way to whatever the agenda is, or bending the truth to further whatever—and it gets more acceptable every day.

In schools, honesty is considered quaint.

And it’s a global problem, “A 2006 study of cheating among US graduates, published in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56% of all MBA students cheated regularly – more than in any other discipline.”

Carolyn Y. Woo, Dean of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business says, “I believe that our current crisis is caused by a failure of values fuelled by perverse incentives, which trumped sound judgment and overwhelmed regulatory enforcements.”

At all ages and all levels it seems to boil down to ‘dishonesty pays’.

Of course, I could be out of touch and cheating has been exempted from dishonesty and moved to a category all its own, but I think I would have read about that. But even if it has there’s plenty of other dishonesty going around these days.

Back to today’s holiday.

Even if every person on the planet was totally honest today it wouldn’t solve anything.

We don’t need one day of honesty and 364 days of the other stuff, so here’s my idea.

Let’s cancel National Honesty Day and starting in 2010 celebrate National Dishonesty Day instead.

That way, we can all be honest 364 days of the year and lie, cheat and steal to our hearts content every April 30.

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Among the annual flood of business and economics books, two recent ones caught my attention.

Shaking the Globe: Courageous Decision-Making in a Changing World by Blythe McGarvie (230 pages, John Wiley & Sons, 2009) addresses the fragmented, multi-polar world of global business.

In this book, targeted to execs at mid-to-large businesses, Ms. McGarvie surveys the plethora of challenges and opportunities that companies face in the new century. She details the diversity in three major areas: cultures, nations, and generations.

Simply put, companies no longer have the luxury of ignoring any of these diverse constituencies. Even if a company is not competing internationally, then it is defending its domestic market against a multi-national competitor.

Likewise for multi-generational workforces and multi-generational customer bases. For the first time ever, many companies have up to four generations in their workforces, and possibly four or even five generations in their customer bases. Illustrating this trend, a recent survey identified the fastest growing age-group of employees in the US as people in their seventies.

The book amply documents the simultaneous interconnection and fragmentation of businesses, people and markets across the globe.  It identifies various segments and constituencies in each major area, providing a good overview for readers wanting an introduction to the topic. The book concludes with three key messages:

“First, we need to understand how the world is interconnected and that all people in it are interdependent… We need to transcend our nationality.

Second, we must face the financial realities that created this need for going global.

Third, we should become aware of the six forces shaping personal courage if we are to go global. Namely, we experience different cultural norms as evident through beliefs, family, and time horizons; communicate with youth in new ways; tap into the talents of women; understand shareholder interests; capture the entrepreneurial drive for innovation; and respect individuals’ value systems.”

Most interesting are the personal vignettes which Ms. McGarvie uses to illustrate particular topics.

As a reader, I look forward to another book by the author, possibly in a case study format, in which she explores specific situations in much more depth, based on her personal experience.

Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Tom Woods (194 pages, 2009, Regnery Publishing, Inc.) is a timely analysis of the underlying causes of the current recession. Although the style is light, the analysis is thorough and detailed. Mr. Woods explores and debunks a number of myths about the current recession.

“In both cases [the Great Depression and the current recession] an inflationary credit boom brought about by the Fed’s lowering of interest rates led to massive resource misallocation and a distorted capital structure. The Fed tried in vain to inflate each of these booms back into existence, and grew frustrated with banks that refused to lend out the new money it was pumping into the banking system. In both cases the federal government sought to prop up prices… rather than allowing them to fall to a level that made sense [in the market].”

Comparing this recession to the Great Depression and many other recessions in the 1800’s, the book identifies the common culprit in the boom/bust business cycles – government manipulation of the currency. Although this conclusion is no great surprise, the compelling analysis makes for good reading. He defends free markets, pointing out that the money supply is not a free market, but a government-controlled monopoly.

Mr. Woods makes a damning case against the Federal Reserve, condemning it for hidden dealings, a bias toward inflation, and backroom collusion with banks. His analysis demonstrates that government action not only causes the booms and busts, but that same government action significantly delays and cripples the eventual recovery.

As if on cue, in December the Fed strong-armed Bank of America to complete its acquisition of Merrill Lynch even when that purchase significantly weakened the bank and increased the risk to the economy. Of course these machinations occurred in secret, with no disclosure and no transparency for investors, customers, and employees of either company.

In his conclusion, Mr. Woods calls for the abolition of the Fed, proving that he is an incurable optimist. Failing that, Mr. Woods predicts significant inflation ahead, due to government debasement of the currency. Government tampering with money is not just a recent phenomenon, as the author illustrates with examples as early as the tenth century, of governments (then kings) cheating their subjects by debasing the currency.

Even in the age of the internet and electronic commerce, some things have not changed.

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Sometimes it seems as if the economic crisis is acting like an earthquake that’s turning over rock after rock and all kinds of icky things are crawling out much to our dismay. A few months ago I wrote about the mindset that seems to be so prevalent these days.

“These days” aren’t all that recent whereas the executive bonuses causing so much rage are just a blip.

Enron was eight years ago as was the phen-phen settlement rip-off, although the two lawyers were only convicted this week.

For decades, the Feds have been scamster heaven and that hasn’t changed, “about 32 percent of the combined monies paid out by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are fraudulent”—often enabled employees—and by 2007 more than $100 billion was spent on contractors for the Iraq war (you can outsource anything) and you can bet your bottom dollar there’s been plenty of fraud there. Just business as usual.

Of course lying, cheating and fraud aren’t new, but what’s depressing is that they seem to become more and more acceptable. Worse, all the signs are ignored until the situation blows up causing massive damage to thousands of people.

Maydoff and the other hedge fund scamsters operated for years with everybody ignoring the warning signs until the Wall Street bomb blew up and investors wanted their money back. At that point all those houses of cards came tumbling down.

Yet as recently as last August Congress was seriously considering turning over the private pension funds to these same people responsible for the financial crisis—even as those funds were crashing.

Remember when you were young and some boring older person told you that “if it seems too good to be true it probably is”? The problem is that as people grew up they tacked two words onto that phrase and those two words helped get us where we are today.

Do you know which two words?

But me.

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I hate leaving things on a down note, so here is something to raise your spirits and your skills.

Dan McCarthy over at Great Leadership hosts a terrific leadership carnival and the latest one just went live today. Click on over and check it out, I guarantee that there’s something there for everyone—and probably more than one something. Enjoy!

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