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Golden Oldies: Lies, Cheating and the Slippery Slope

Monday, January 7th, 2019

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Lying isn’t new, but it is certainly in the ascendancy. It doesn’t matter what media you follow, not a day goes by without a story about someone in a position of trust lying — whether politician, corporate chief, religious leader, friend, relative, or someone else. It is important to remember that few, if any, see their actions as problematic.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Lying and cheating are common occurrences and recent research shows that, contrary to popular wisdom (wishful thinking?), they do not make people feel badly.

In an interview, Dan Ariely, a leading behavioral economist at Duke and author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves, made two comments that especially caught my eye for both their perception and accuracy.

“I have had lots of discussions with big cheaters — insider trading, accounting fraud, people who have sold games in the NBA, doping in sports. With one exception, all of them were stories of slippery slopes.”

“When you are in the midst of it, you are in a very, very different mindset…. You are not a psychopath, and you are not cheating. You are doing what everybody else is doing.”

Slippery slopes, indeed.

KG’s comment after reading the interview brings forth another salient point.

It is my belief no person ever quite understands their own artful dodges used to escape from the often grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Long before lying became the issue it is today, Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) had a great response.

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

The problem with this solution is that it requires self-awareness, personal effort, determination and grit.

All of which, if there is no financial reward, are in short supply these days.

Flickr image credit: Sean MacEntee

Managers, Micro Cultures And Values

Wednesday, August 30th, 2017

Note: It’s imperative to recognize that culture has nothing to do with perks, such as free food, fancy offices, free services, etc.

Culture is about values and how they play out in both the internal and external functioning of the company.

But company culture isn’t the end game — micro cultures are.

Micro cultures are based on individual bosses’ values.

Both cultures are fundamental to that perennially popular subject, employee engagement.

HBS’ Jim Heskett recently asked his audience what’s needed to engender employee engagement given that engaged employees are 2.7% more productive.

Most of the responses talked about the need for managers to respect their people, listen to ideas from everyone, have better people skills, etc., and several mentioned the skills acquired with an MBA.

But, as I pointed out, and Heskett cited in his summary, “Respect and valuing employee input have little to do with education and much to do with personal values.”

Unfortunately, education is no guarantee of values.

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.”

If scholastic success was based on cheating it’s likely that that lack of respect/get-ahead-at-all-costs mentality would carry over to their management style.

Yesterday’s post ended with this comment,

That [provide an environment in which people can learn, grow and excel] is what a good boss is supposed to do.

But it’s the great ones who actually do it.

In fact, they go beyond that and shelter their people from any kind of toxic culture coming down from above.

Image credit: thinkpublic

Ryan’s Journal: Has The Nation Lost Its Mind?

Thursday, March 2nd, 2017

As a nation, and perhaps as a species, we reward success above all else.

I am in sales and a mantra I have heard many times is, “exceeding quota covers a multitude of sins”. Did you show up hungover to a team meeting? Did you grope someone at an after-hours event? Did you mouth off to your boss?

These are things I have all personally witnessed at work and the one question always asked was, “are they hitting their quota?”

Why do I bring this all up you ask?

As you may have read Uber is having a tough few months and an even worse week. I won’t jump on the bandwagon to bemoan their culture, but I will say it’s probably not limited to them alone.

Because we have put value in success above all else it is easy to forgive when those companies or people err.

In my professional life I have had an opportunity to work in both large and small organizations. These are all made up of people with strengths and weaknesses, but one common thing I see is those that produce revenue and growth get away with a bit more.

Now this is only anecdotal, but headlines can support this claim to a degree. Uber, Google, Wal-Mart have all had scandals or missteps.

While this may not be indicative of social decay, it points to an opportunity for improvement.

One thing I truly believe is culture begins with self.

The choices we make as individuals are what shape the greater group.

When I see these stories of harassment, abuse or other issues it is not a company that is doing it, it’s an individual. Personal responsibility must be an expected outcome if we want a change.

How can we start?

There is always the Golden Rule or Karma to consider.

If you want to consider science alone we can look to Newton’s third law as reference.

All of these have a common theme — your actions will have equal reactions in measure.

Perhaps that can be a basis for culture moving forward?

Image credit: Dani Mettler

An Insightful Comment On Cheating

Wednesday, March 1st, 2017

I received an email yesterday morning from the CEO of a well-known growth company. He wrote regarding yesterday’s post about cheating.

I asked why he wrote instead of leaving it as a comment.

He replied, I would rather avoid having it associated with me. If you want to write a post and have anonymous attribution, that’s fine. 

It’s an important observation and one that is especially applicable now. I’m sharing it with no additional comments from me.

Anything I tried to add would be superfluous and detract from its importance.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/9557815@N05/30738398861/When there are strong incentives to cheat and large negative consequences if one avoids cheating (since everyone is doing it), what should be the inducement for not cheating?

Where cheating is rewarded, truth and uprightness has potentially large negative consequences.

An organization or society built on fraud, trickery and deceit will eventually descend into chaos and anarchy.

Without leadership among both common people and the privileged, this is inexorable destiny.

Whenever there is a trend toward something, there are significant costs associated with changing the trajectory.

Who can or should be willing to bear these costs?

Image credit: Abi Skipp

Ducks in a Row: Cheating As A Basis Of Culture

Tuesday, February 28th, 2017

What do Hampton Creek, Theranos, Zenefits, Lending Club, WrkRiot, ScoreBig, Rothenberg Ventures have in common?

They all channeled the “fake it ‘til you make it” ethos of Silicon Valley.

Only they didn’t make it.

Previous well-known cheats include MiniScribe, WorldCom and Enron and they’re only the tip of the iceberg.

Cheating is the getting of a reward for ability or finding an easy way out of an unpleasant situation by dishonest means. It is generally used for the breaking of rules to gain unfair advantage in a competitive situation. — Wikipedia

Yesterday’s post focused on the prevalence of cheating at all school levels and its acceptance as a laissez-faire, “everyone does it” attitude.

Of course, cheating isn’t new, but the more ubiquitous it’s become the more it’s been shrugged off.

And it’s this cheating mindset that has shaped Silicon Valley over the last decade or so.

Along with faking it is the “do whatever it takes to win” form of cheating as exemplified by Uber’s Travis Kalanick.

Cheating on ideas, such as meritocracy and fairness, has certainly contributed to the rise of the bro culture, also exemplified by Uber and recently documented by Susan Fowler. However, as Uber engineer Aimee Lucido points out, Uber is far from being alone.

It does seem that a large percentage of the egos that drive, and aspire to drive, innovation, along with the egos that fund that drive, have lost touch with the society they claim to serve and, instead, bought into an attitude espoused by Donald Trump.

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

We would be better off if they would channel Sophocles, instead.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/5382067751/

 

Image credit: Sean MacEntee

Golden Oldies: Leadership’s Future: Cheating Is OK

Monday, February 27th, 2017

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a Feb decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

When I wrote this post in 2009 one of the things I wondered was this. If 95% of students felt it was OK to cheat (not a new attitude) to get what they wanted in school would they see cheating and other similar actions/attitudes as acceptable in the grownup world of work?

While eight years isn’t all that long, we’re already seeing the answer and it’s not pretty. As usual, Silicon Valley is leading the way and, sadly, it will probably get a lot worse before it gets any better

Read other Golden Oldies here.

cheat

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?

Image credit: Jhayne

If the Shoe Fits: Is Airbnb a Good Corporate Role Model?

Friday, July 18th, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mFrom Napster to Uber and Airbnb, I’ve never been partial to startups whose success was based on cheating, AKA, breaking laws.

And the explanation that the law(s) are outmoded, even if true, doesn’t change my opinion.

Airbnb just introduced a new logo that was jumped on in the Twitterscape for its blatant sexual innuendo.

But that pales in comparison to its apparent theft.

 Airbnb’s new logo is an exact copy of the Automation Anywhere logo, as Jay Yarow pointed out on Twitter

Automation-Anywhere

Automation Anywhere started life as Tethys Solutions, LLC in 2003 and rebranded as Automation Anywhere in 2012.

Perhaps Airbnb sees appropriating a logo in the same light as moving into a community and ignoring its laws.

It should be interesting.

And with a client list that includes Cisco, Harley, MasterCard, Coach, Boeing, Oracle, Intel, Virgin and dozens of others, I doubt Automation Anywhere is going to roll over any time soon.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Do Honor Codes Work?

Wednesday, June 18th, 2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tostie14/34110178I expect stupid from teens; it’s not really their fault, since brain science has proved that teen brains are in a process of change and during that time the frontal cortex isn’t functioning.

The frontal cortex is where ethical judgments are made, along with connecting cause and effect.

Middlebury College has always run on an honor code, as do many colleges and universities, but it is giving in.

“So the whole idea of an honor code is very honorable, quite evidently. But there’s an issue of it being actually implemented. I think there are a lot of reasons, both internal and external to Middlebury, why it’s problematic to assume that such an honor code has a degree of credibility.” –Ronald Liebowitz, Middlebury’s president

Jessica Cheung, a junior at Middlebury College who wrote this essay, sees what’s happening and isn’t happy.

“Ethical judgment, it seems, has been supplanted by our need to succeed. (…) The honor code is a model of a world I wish to live in: one of honesty, personal responsibility, learning for the right reason, choosing right in a moment of temptation. These are the very deepest and most literal things we ask a school to teach us. If all this dies, what else can survive?

Just as critical, those who aren’t cheating are loathe to report cheating when they see it.

And it isn’t just Middlebury; the problem is rampant in colleges and universities across the country, including the most elite, like Stanford and Princeton.

Granted, brain maturity doesn’t happen overnight; research says that the brain continues maturing into the twenties, but based today’s ethical attitudes and watching AFV brain maturity is occurring well into people’s forties and fifties—if at all.

The stupid and unethical things, such as cheating, that we do as children and continue to do as teens and young adults don’t suddenly stop when we hit adulthood nor do the factors that motivated their doing—competition, the desire to succeed and peer pressure.

Food for thought as we enter another election year full of lies and cheats—on all sides of the table.

Flickr image credit: Kevin Tostado

If the Shoe Fits: Cheating for an Edge

Friday, May 16th, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mCheating is rife across the board, so seeing more of it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

I think what does surprise is not how overt it is these days, but the assumption that everyone will participate.

Especially when money is involved.

Recently the CEO of soon-to-go-public Arista Networks offered Fortune Sr. Editor at Large Adam Lashinsky, who had written about the company previously, ““friends and family” shares in Arista’s upcoming initial public offering. The offer was explicit….” (He declined.)

Lashinsky saw similar acts before the last tech bubble burst and sees this as a sign that there is indeed a tech bubble that will soon blow up.

When times are so good that executives are willing to disregard the difference between ethical and unctuous behavior, it’s just one sign that the end, relatively speaking, is near.

I’m not sure unctuous applies as an alternative to unethical, but there is no question about the ethics of trying to bribe anyone in a position to affect an IPO.

It’s cheating, plain and simple and the SEC tends to frown on it. 

Sadly, many don’t see it as an ethical lapse, let alone cheating.

They see it as reasonable business practice.

How do you see it?

Image credit: HikingArtist

Lies, Cheating and the Slippery Slope

Monday, May 12th, 2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/5382067751

Lying and cheating are common occurrences and recent research shows that, contrary to popular wisdom (wishful thinking?), they do not make people feel badly.

In an interview, Dan Ariely, a leading behavioral economist at Duke and author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves, made two comments that especially caught my eye for both their perception and accuracy.

“I have had lots of discussions with big cheaters — insider trading, accounting fraud, people who have sold games in the NBA, doping in sports. With one exception, all of them were stories of slippery slopes.”

“When you are in the midst of it, you are in a very, very different mindset…. You are not a psychopath, and you are not cheating. You are doing what everybody else is doing.”

There’s a lot I could say about this, but I prefer to share a quote that KG sent me after reading the article.

I believe it is the key to the solution and states it succinctly.

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live. –Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924)

The only problem with this solution is that it requires self-awareness, personal effort, determination and grit.

All of which are in short supply these days.

Flickr image credit: Sean MacEntee

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