Research by two economists at Kellogg Turned up an interesting insight.

“…CEOs with a military background are much less likely to engage in corporate fraud compared to their civilian-only peers—up to 70% less likely, in fact.”

The problem, to my way of thinking, is that those studied came from a different military culture than the current one.

“…biographical data on chief executives from the 800 largest US firms each year from 1980 and 1991 and from approximately 1500 publicly traded US firms from 1992 to 2006.

The current military is a bit different than the one they were a part of; you might even say it’s not your father’s military any more, let alone your grandfather’s.

The Air Force cheating and drug scandals come at a time when a large number of senior officers in other branches of the military have been investigated, penalized or fired in connection with allegations of sexual improprieties, sexual violence, financial mismanagement or poor judgment.

None of this means you should avoid hiring ex-military, since cheating is just as, if not more, prevalent in the civilian population.

What it means is that you should interview everyone, at every level, carefully and not make assumptions based on generalizations or previous positions.

Flickr image credit: Mike Baird

Over the years hundreds of bosses have explained to me why top colleges and high GPAs were critical to hiring the best people.

They explained why hiring only from top schools assured top candidates.

They enlightened me as to the importance of high GPAs in their hiring decisions.

What they never did was convince me.

They blustered when I told them neither had much value when evaluating candidates.

And they got downright irate when I added that whatever value they did have dropped 20% a year, since much (most?) of what they learned was rendered irrelevant in the next five years.

Actually, the value probably drops faster now, since the world has sped up a lot since I said that.

If you find yourself disputing this and still putting your faith in ‘brand-name’ schools and high GPAs I suggest you pay close attention to Harvard’s grade inflation.

“It’s really indefensible,” Harvey C. Mansfield, a faculty member for more than five decades, said in a telephone interview. (…) “I thought the most prevalent grade was an A-minus, which is bad enough,” when I asked the question [about the most frequently given grade], it was worse.”

But even Mansfield goes along with it.

Mansfield described how, in recent years, he himself has taken to giving students two grades: one that shows up on their transcript and one he believes they actually deserve.

“I didn’t want my students to be punished by being the only ones to suffer for getting an accurate grade,” he said, adding that administrators must take the lead in curbing the trend.

While I agree grade inflation isn’t limited to Harvard, I’m willing to bet it’s more prevalent at brand-name schools.

Hopefully, the next time you find yourself dazzled by a combination of school and GPA, you’ll remember Professor Mansfield and take both with a pound or two of salt.

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In our society success = money. As children we are taught to pursue success, so actions that bring success within our grasp are honed from childhood on and cheating is one of those actions. I’ve often focused on the prevalence of cheating in schools, how it’s rationalized and where it leads.

That rationalization is succinctly explained by a kid attending a premier high school.

“It’s like, ‘I’ll keep my integrity and fail this test’ — no. No one wants to fail a test,” he said, explaining how he and others persuaded themselves to cheat. “You could study for two hours and get an 80, or you could take a risk and get a 90.”

In short, they wanted success, which meant getting into the “right” school; of course, getting into the right school rarely spells the end of cheating.

Over and over again, students told us that they admired good work and wanted to be good workers. But they also told us they wanted — ardently — to be successful. They feared that their peers were cutting corners and that if they themselves behaved ethically, they would be bested. And so, they told us in effect, “Let us cut corners now and one day, when we have achieved fame and fortune, we’ll be good workers and set a good example.”

Of course, the drive for success doesn’t end with school; if anything it increases. But many people have a naïve belief that cheating is found more often in business and politics, while the world of science is one of higher integrity—would it were actually true.

In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two scientists and a medical communications consultant analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in the biomedical and life sciences. They found that misconduct was the reason for three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause.

Even 50 years of integrity, including 30 with the FBI, isn’t protection against that lure.

“For 30 years I’ve sacrificed to get to this point.” But his exit strategy, according to federal prosecutors, included his participation in a multimillion-dollar international scheme that involved the lieutenant colonel in charge of the United States Army’s Special Forces operations in Afghanistan and a Boston-based defense contractor.

Cheating is rife in the world of sports and that includes fishing—and I don’t mean the stories about one that got away.

Those who run, monitor and compete in tournaments said that cheating scandals have tarnished the wholesome image of fishing and ruined the final rankings in many competitions, as people handed trophies, cash and other prizes were later found to have cheated.

Cheating often involves taking advantage, whether of circumstances or people—or both. Just look what can happen to people whose circumstances force them to rent a computer instead of buying one.

DesignerWare, a Pennsylvania-based software maker, to create a program that secretly captured “webcam pictures of children, partially undressed individuals, and intimate activities at home.” This included people who while engaging in sexual activities in their homes were being recorded on their rental computers. (…) In a news release issued by the F.T.C., Jon Leibowitz, the agency’s chairman, said the software had also captured consumers’ private e-mails, bank account information and medical records. In some instances the software was able to capture Social Security numbers, medical records and doctor’s names. Most disturbing, the webcam captured pictures of children.

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

Cheating is nothing new, and perhaps the fact that cheating is so universal at all levels of school is partly responsible for the easy slide into various types of corporate cheating like Facebook’s infamous privacy stunts and its gaming words.

Many of Google’s recent actions seem to violate its “don’t be evil” mantra.

And according to Marco Camisani Calzolari, a corporate communication and digital languages professor in Milan, 46% of followers of corporate Twitter accounts are bots.

“The number of followers is no longer a valid indicator of the popularity of a Twitter user, and can no longer be analyzed separately from qualitative information.”

Startups live or die based on their creativity, but studies have linked creativity and unethical behavior.

The financial industry may lead the pack when it comes to behaving unethically, but they certainly don’t have an exclusive on unethical behavior.

Company executives are paid to maximize profits, not to behave ethically. Evidence suggests that they behave as corruptly as they can, within whatever constraints are imposed by law and reputation.

Now it seems that the sleeping giant, AKA, the public, AKA, your customers, are waking up to the problem and their trust levels are plummeting—with cause.

Customers and users have no reason to blindly accept your word that you’re trustworthy, so don’t expect them to.

Companies from startups to giants have to prove they are trustworthy—not once, but over and over as long as they are in business.

Option Sanity™ is trustworthy.

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Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

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I used to have a really cool purple neon frame for my rear license plate; then I moved and was stopped by a cop because they aren’t legal where I now live. I choked when he said the fine was $150 and explained that I had just moved and didn’t know it was illegal. He reminded me that ‘I didn’t know’ didn’t matter, but let me off with a warning (the frame came off that night).

Ignorantia juris non excusat or Ignorantia legis neminem excusat (Latin for “ignorance of the law does not excuse” or “ignorance of the law excuses no one”) is a legal principle holding that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely because he or she was unaware of its content.

I was reminded of this when I read that those growing up in the digital age may not realize that appropriating words and skipping attribution is stealing.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

And that reminded me of my days in an office and the guy who ate whatever was in the fridge that appealed to him—even when it had a name on it. When confronted, he said he would have asked, but didn’t know whose it was or didn’t notice the name.

He obviously knew it belonged to someone, unless he believed in a refrigerator fairy, but he was hungry and that trumped all.

The words in cyberspace, especially the ones worth copying, like the food in the fridge, didn’t get there on their own and there sure as hell isn’t an Internet fairy.

Anyone who copies or downloads from the Internet knows the material didn’t magically appear—that is if they bother thinking about it at all.

And it isn’t just those in school, I came across a white paper on a business site and was flabbergasted to see whole sections lifted from this blog and twisted to fit the authors premise.

Needless to say, I was not amused.

Jen T. Verbumessor said, “Imitation is the highest form of pissing me off.  Quit stealing my content and violating my copyright.”

We who write work hard; those who copy sans permission or attribution are thieves and ignorance doesn’t change that.

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Cheating was in the spotlight in a recent NY Times Room for Debate, which includes opinions from a professor, author, recent grad and high school teacher, along with reader comments on each.

The opinion that drew the most comments was from Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. He pinpoints two causes, 1) pressure to achieve has made cheating a “survival skill” and 2) they don’t know it’s cheating because concepts such as plagiarism and attribution are foreign to them as a result of Web 2.0 and social media’s interactive nature, mashups, file sharing, etc.

I didn’t read all the comments, but #2 from George Canada was especially interesting.

I doubt that anything has changed. At Berkeley in the academic year 1952-53 my teaching assistant in an American History course said “Mr C—-, if you don’t start bringing cheat notes to the exams, you’ll get a B in this course.” I looked as astonished as I was, I suppose, since he went on to say something like “don’t you know that everyone else is bring in notes and cheat sheets?” I didn’t know and I didn’t act and I did get a B in that course. In a psychology course I apparently got the highest or very high mark: the professor said “you must have brought in the perfect cheat sheets.”

Perhaps what we are seeing today is the cumulative effect of cheaters raising cheaters, so that the act itself is becoming more pervasive, more blatant, more socially acceptable, technology-enabled and therefore much easier.

Perhaps it really is no big deal, as we keep being told by those who do it; perhaps it has always been pervasive, as George Canada’s experience leads us to believe.

Perhaps I’m behind the times and test scores are more important than learning; perhaps cheating is a necessary skill in today’s world.

What do you think?

Image credit: Hariadhi on Wikipedia Commons

When looking for a talented entry-level candidate, grades carry great weight with managers and HR.

This is especially true when hiring advanced degrees where starting salaries remain high and even more-so when the degrees are in the professions—doctors and lawyers.

Recruiters scour university campuses looking for what they judge to be the crème de la crème and you, the client, pay big bucks to access that talent.

Customers assume a certain level of integrity from educational institutions and equate grades with expertise.

So what happens to that integrity and those expectations when law schools lower the bar?

In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University, Loyola Law School Los Angeles, and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month.

Granted, it’s being done in K-12 schools all over the country, but law school? And at some of the most prestigious US law schools, too.

These the same associates who do most of the real work when your company shells out $500 or more an hour to hire a name on the door.

Many will become judges, local, state and Federal—even to the Supreme Court.

Some will join Federal enforcement agencies—SEC, Justice, FBI.

And many will eventually enter politics, which is justified considering how far that bar has already been lowered.

What’s next? Well, we have a real shortage of doctors now that is getting worse as our population ages.

Doesn’t that give you a warm and fuzzy feeling in the pit of your stomach?

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johncohen/152850884/

Columnist Donald J. Myers, a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel, bemoans the lack of integrity so prevalent today, in and out of the military.

The military goes to extreme lengths to develop integrity because, unlike the civilian world, a lack of integrity in the military costs lives — not just money.

I would argue that the excessive lack of integrity in the corporate world has also cost lives; the thousands whose lives were destroyed by Enron and the recent banking debacle, among others, cost lives and, although most are still walking, they are definitely wounded, some mortally.

The last couple of years media has been trumpeting the importance of leadership integrity and various surveys of global executives confirmed its importance.

But that was then and this is now.

Fast Company cites a new study by IBM—

For CEOs, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking… The study is the largest known sample of one-on-one CEO interviews, with over 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders across 60 nations and 33 industries polled on what drives them in managing their companies in today’s world.

Here’s how the numbers broke down—

About 60% of CEOs polled cited creativity as the most important leadership quality, compared with 52% for integrity and 35% for global thinking.

(Yes, I realize that totals 147%, but it’s IBM…)

I have no argument with creativity, after all creativity gave us Avatar, iPods and Viagra, but it also gave us CDMs and CDOs.

This points up how important it is for leaders to practice integrity as they embrace creativity.

Image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/963443

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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Image credit: Hariadhi on Wikipedia Commons

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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Image credit: chris2k on sxc.hu