What’s going on? This post is a call for your thoughts.

I simply don’t understand what today’s parents are thinking—assuming they are thinking at all.

18 years ago Wanda Holloway tried to hire a hit man to improve her 13 year old daughter’s chances of making the cheer-leading squad.

More recently Lori Drew helped her teenage daughter fake a MySpace page that drove another teen to suicide.

Parents launch efforts to destroy teachers who don’t hand out ‘As’; they scream at referees and umpires when they disagree with a call; they threaten coaches who don’t allow their kids to play enough.

On one hand they enable their kids to avoid all responsibility and on the other castigate them for not living up to whatever parental dreams they are trying to realize.

I know that it’s not all parents; and this isn’t a new rant, but it’s one to which I keep coming back.

And it came back with a vengeance, in fact you might say my outrage cup runneth over, when I read that Senator John Ensign’s parents paid off his mistress.

“The wealthy parents of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) gave $96,000 last year to the staffer who was then his mistress and to her family, his attorney said yesterday.

The gifts to Cynthia L. Hampton and her family were given “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time,” according to the lawyer, Paul Coggins.”

Ensign’s parents aren’t Gen-Xers and probably not Boomers, so this problem isn’t new.

You read stories about helicopter parents all the time, but when does it end?

How can anyone expect a person to make good choices when their mistakes (and worse) are ‘handled’ for them by their parents?

What do you think about Ensign’s parents’ actions? Obviously, pay-offs aren’t in the same class as murder; are they better or equal with bullying?

I don’t have any answers, but we’d better find some—and fast!

An open discussion is a place to start so let’s hear your thoughts.

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I’m old enough to remember when maturity was something to strive for; when living with your parents post 18 made you a loser; when being cool also meant being independent and paying for your own place was a badge of honor.

But that was then and this is now.

Andrew Gordon sent me a link to a Washington Post article discussing how thirty-something is the new twenty-something (the comments are well worth reading, too).

In other words, people are “coming of age” far later in life than ever before.

Maybe this isn’t surprising, since people aren’t aging the way they did.

In books and films from the forties and before, even into the fifties, people in their fifties and sixties were described or portrayed as elderly, while those in their seventies and up were considered ancient—tell that to a Boomer if you want to die young.

But is it really necessary to delay growing up just because people are staying young longer?

Does staying young really require immaturity?

Has ‘adult’ become a dirty word synonymous with out-of-date, out-of-touch, unable to grow and change?

If so, we are in deep doo-doo.

Obviously, there are millions of responsible twenty and thirty-year-olds who are building careers and relationships and families.

But there are millions more who are still living at home; hanging out and who have no real concept of responsibility.

Then there are those who look great on the surface, but thwart them, throw a few obstacles their way, or scratch them with a real conversation and the immaturity oozes out.

If this keeps up the 2025 remake of “The 40 Year Old Virgin” will be “The 50Year Old Virgin” or maybe 55.

40 years ago Spock made being smart sexy.

How can we make maturity sexy?

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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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What do you think about when you take stock of your life? What do you strive for? What makes you feel successful?

Before I go into this there is a caveat I want to make very clear.

What I’m about to write is NOT a judgment call—having been brought up in a judgmental family I don’t judge. Sure, I have opinions, we all do, but I don’t judge. The most I can say is “X isn’t right for me, but Y is.”

I might recommend Y; I might even argue passionately regarding the merits of Y, but in the end it’s your decision and you need to tweak/modify/change Y to fit your MAP—if you decide you have any interest in it at all—because Y is a product of my MAP and no two MAPs are identical.

Back to taking stock.

In a post at LeaderTalk, Becky Robinson says, “I still have more than half my life left to live… Still, with each birthday I feel the anxiety of wondering if I am living up to my potential. … Often, I can’t wake up from my daydreams of a disciplined and directed life long enough to make that life happen. … I have learned from experience that I need both [self awareness and willingness to change] if I want to be successful in life and leadership.”

To me, it was a very sad post. Sad because the focus seemed to be both personally judgmental and set such store on such an intangible as ‘leadership’—which is, in fact, a description applied and substantiated by others.

But that is probably just me. I’m very different.

I’m substantially older than Rebecca and have bounced, and occasional blundered, through life opening doors as the mood moved me.

I’ve made and lost money as well as friends as our lives diverged.

To paraphrase something I read somewhere, “a person should be judged by the number of people s/he brings to success,” and based on that I am enormously successful.

If I have any guiding philosophy it’s the same as Google’s—do no evil. I work very hard at not hurting anyone by word or deed, advertently or inadvertently. I doubt that I’m always successful, but it’s a goal about which I’m passionate.

I do not lie, cheat or steal.

If I were to have a tombstone when I die (I won’t, since I’m being cremated and scattered) I think I’d like it to say, “Miki worked hard to do no evil, hurt no person and give back more than she took.”

What would you want on yours?

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I’ve written a lot about the problems and difficulties with Gen Y, but I want to make something clear.

Gen Y didn’t raise themselves to feel entitled, require constant praise or expect success for trying their hardest.

Jan left a comment a few weeks ago and I think she speaks for a large number of her generation, “There is a great amount of pressure to earn good grades and gain a GREAT career, as if somehow that is the only way to gain success in our lives. … The present often does not matter, including learning the subject. Students live under this constant pressure to make good grades, with that fear of failure programmed into the back of our minds.” (Please take a moment to read her entire comment.)

Decades ago after my sister had her first child she said, “I know that I’ll do things that mess up my kids, but they damn well won’t be the same things that messed us up,” and they weren’t.

This is normal life, with the previous generation screwing up their kids in some way and the kids eventually sorting it out—or not—and then moving on to the next generation, but it’s changed now.

Greg Jayne is the Sports Editor for my local paper and he summed it up nicely in a column about the people’s attitude towards performance enhancing drugs.

“Last year, Major League Baseball drew 78.6 million spectators to the ballpark… The sport generated about $6 billion in revenue, nearly twice what it generated in 2000 and roughly $20 for every man, woman and child in the United States. … The baseball-watching public simply doesn’t care that much about players who cheat the game. … We live in an era in which style trumps substance, and the superficial is held in such high regard that we all are diminished. Is there any reason to think that baseball should be different? Is there any reason to express moral outrage when somebody is trying to improve his performance and help his team win? That is, after all, the ethos of the time.”

Yet there are still supposed to be areas that are sacrosanct, people we assume will work for the good of our kids; people to whom we don’t give a second thought—until their actions blow up in our faces.

Priests/ministers/rabbis. Teachers. Family. Judges.

It’s terrible when people are driven by their own inner demons, but somehow it’s even worse when they ruin kids’ lives out of plain old fashioned greed.

“…two judges pleaded guilty to tax evasion and wire fraud in a scheme that involved sending thousands of juveniles to two private detention centers in exchange for $2.6 million in kickbacks. … Virtually all former colleagues and courthouse workers would not allow themselves to be identified because the federal investigation into the kickback scheme was continuing and they feared for their jobs if they alienated former allies of the judges.”

Obviously, it’s not just individuals, but the laissez faire attitude prevalent in a large percentage of all generations that’s driving the problems to levels not seen previously.

Enough is enough. We need change—but where to start?

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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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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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The media and most people are all enraged because many of the bailed-out companies owe taxes, but I don’t see the big deal.

“Nearly two-thirds of U.S. companies and 68% of foreign corporations do not pay federal income taxes…The Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined samples of corporate tax returns filed between 1998 and 2005…an annual average of 1.3 million U.S. companies and 39,000 foreign companies doing business in the United States paid no income taxes – despite having a combined $2.5 trillion in revenue. The study showed that 28% of foreign companies and 25% of U.S. corporations with more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in sales paid no federal income taxes in 2005. Those companies totaled a combined $372 billion in sales for the largest foreign companies and $1.1 trillion in revenue for the biggest U.S. companies.”

This isn’t new; I remember hearing about it decades ago, so why freak out now?

The thing that really gets me is that AIG is suing the US government, which essentially owns it.

“A.I.G. sued the government last month in a bid to force it to return the payments, which stemmed in large part from its use of aggressive tax deals, some involving entities controlled by the company’s financial products unit in the Cayman Islands, Ireland, the Dutch Antilles and other offshore havens.”

And even in this day and age $306 million is (or should be) more than small change.

Does this qualify as irony, stupidity or just good, old-fashioned insanity?

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Usually I only offer up one link when the reading is heavy, but today I have two.

The first is a book I read about on Expert CEO.

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer is an exploration of “the neural machinery behind our decision-making processes: a network of dopamine-sensitive cells in the brain’s emotional and cognitive centers, which tie feelings and reason together so closely that the two operate almost as one. According to Lehrer, correct decisions require an awareness of both halves of the equation — and a perfect balance of visceral response and cognitive knowledge.”

I’m so far behind on my reading that I don’t know when I’ll get to it, but if one of you wants to do a guest review for Leadership Turn I’d be delighted.

The heavy reading comes from Max Bazerman, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. A working paper “shows that seemingly innocuous aspects of the environment can promote the decision to act ethically or unethically. Key concepts include:

• Once people behave dishonestly, they are able to morally disengage, setting off a downward spiral of future bad behavior and ever more lenient moral codes.
• However, this slippery slope can be forestalled with simple measures, such as honor codes, that increase people’s awareness of ethical standards.
• Moral disengagement is not always a necessary condition leading to dishonesty, but it may in fact result from unethical behavior.
• The decision to behave dishonestly changes levels of moral disengagement, and the awareness of ethical standards affects the decision to engage in unethical behavior.”

The paper is downloadable and I think you’ll find it interesting.

As always, your thoughts on the subject are of great interest, so please share them.

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Can you imagine telling your boss that you deserve a raise because you come to work on time every day?

Or that she shouldn’t fire you for poor performance because you tried really, really hard?

Last week on Leadership’s Future a young man named Andrew started a conversation. During it he gave me a link to an article in the NY Times about student expectations.

Expectations based on that sense of entitlement which makes me nuts.

It seems that today’s students expect an A if they attend class and turn in assignments.

And it’s wrong for the professors to consider the quality of work, since a lower grade will affect their job opportunities and that’s not fair.

“A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading. … Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.”

It’s not surprising, since K-12 inflates grades, passes everyone in order to keep their funding, and fires teachers who cling to the out-moded idea that school is a place to actually learn.

Here are two student quotes that seem to sum up a majority viewpoint…

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade. What else is there really than the effort that you put in? If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point? If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.” –Jason Greenwood, senior, University of Maryland

“I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B.” –Sarah Kinn, junior, University of Vermont

As hiring managers and potential colleagues I’m sure this attitude thrills you no end.

Do you find it terrifying that at some point in the future these same students may be your doctor or lawyer and that, reality forbid, these are the people who will teach the next generation? I do.

The story drew 131 comments; I didn’t read them all, but here are three that struck me.

“I think the disputes about grading also stem from students approaching education as consumers. Because they pay to attend school, they have an attitude of, “the customer is always right” and feel they should have their grades their way.” –Tiffany Mills, Detroit, MI

“Having been for a time peripherally associated with a Junior Year Abroad program in Paris, I was shocked to learn that certain parents of students whose grades were mediocre would actually telephone the program director and threaten her with various forms of retribution if the grades were not inflated. Apparently students are not the only ones with a sense of entitlement!!” — Jill Bourdais, Paris, France

I appreciated this one, since it sums up what should happen when grades are down…

“I received a D+ on my first paper for a history course in my freshman year of college. After the initial shock and indignation wore off…  That course was a turning point in my education. I wasn’t just regurgitating facts, but thinking about the source materials from the perspective of those who wrote it and really analyzing the content. It showed me a new way to read into materials in other courses and helped me earn better grades. I earned a B in the class and was delighted with the grade, considering how far I come. A bad grade isn’t always a bad thing. It can be an opportunity to improve.” — Maggi S, Chicago, IL

And finally, a comment that probably reflects what many of you are currently thinking.

“Students who think that just attending class and doing the reading is enough are in for a huge shock when (or if) they enter the world of work. I’m a writer. If I spend hours on a piece, but it doesn’t do what my client wants it to do, I’ve failed. I don’t get paid. Merely “doing the work” ain’t enough; it’s the QUALITY of the work that counts.” — JoMo, Minneapolis MN

On a practical note, hiring managers might find it of more value to look at grades a bit differently as I explain here.

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