Ask anybody with a blog and they will tell you that while Akismet does a great job of catching spam, making sure that real comments weren’t also caught is a nuisance; especially if you let it go too long. Most spam comments are stupid, meaningless or boring, but lately one spambot has been leaving quotes, so I copied the last batch to share with you today; Plato’s and Asimov’s were pure serendipity from other places.
With the Republican primary in full throttle I thought this comment by Edward R. Murrow was very appropriate; note that it applies equally well to the Democrats, “When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.”
Politicians on all sides of the spectrum have been providing a constant supply of sexual peccadilloes and we can than Henry Kissinger for providing a succinct explanation of why, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Throughout history sexual peccadilloes have been dominantly the province of men, which may have led to Lady Nancy Astor’s scathing judgment, “I married beneath me. All women do.”
Centuries apart, Plato and George Dorsey offered similar opinions on the same subject,
Plato “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
George Dorsey: “Play is the beginning of knowledge.”
That’s an attitude that ties closely with Dale Carnegie’s thought, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
Finally, whether globally or locally, humans had best take heed of Isaac Asimov’s words or nothing will be solved in time, “If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”
I read a review about a new Lincoln Steffens biography and it was interesting enough that I looked for quotes and added (as usual) my own interpretation.
There’s been a lot of discussion on the value of college, mostly as a result of the recession. Steffens thoughts are from long ago, but they certainly resonate today, “It is possible to get an education at a university. It has been done; not often”
I puzzled over this one and finally decided that there is one incorrect word. “Somebody must take a chance. The monkeys who became men, and the monkeys who didn’t are still jumping around in trees making faces at the monkeys who did.” To make sense it should read, “Somebody must take a chance. Some monkeys became men, and the monkeys who didn’t are still jumping around in trees making faces at the monkeys who did.” Or, if it was rewritten for today’s entrepreneurial media frenzy, it might read, “Somebody must take a chance. Some people became entrepreneurs, and the people who didn’t are still jumping around in trees making faces at the people who did.”
Did you know that Steffens is responsible for the truism, “Nothing fails like success?”
He also said, “Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.” Totally accurate, but these days it should read ‘any group or individual‘.
But when all is said and done, remember, “Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.”
Berkeley Breathed, Berke to his friends and fans, authored the Pulitzer Prize winning Bloom County comic strip until he chose to move on to other projects (he writes children’s books, designed greeting cards and has a new movie coming out). For those who miss it or were too young to have enjoyed his biting satire in Bloom County you can buy the complete collection in book form.
The amazing thing about Breathed is that no matter what he was always funny and, therefore, unforgettable, “Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It’s the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children’s books.”
He voiced something that I constantly wonder about, “I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn’t exist.” This is as true of “intellectuals” as it is of those who swim in the deep end of popular culture; it’s just not as obvious.
He said, “I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I’d bet I wouldn’t lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.” So true; some comics are now drawn by the children of the originator.
Comics aside, breathed offers up some useful life wisdom.
In a world of warring ideologies that offer no room for comprise I hope these words will resonate and stick with you, “Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.”
And finally, the most important thought of all, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
Something to think about, especially at this time of year.
Kids hate liars, but rarely turn in the culprit since that would be snitching, yet that doesn’t stop them from glorying when the liar is caught.
But what about when they grow up?
Fudge, fib, prevaricate, lie.
We’ve seen so much of it the last couple of years, more than in the past—but is that accurate? Or is more just coming to the surface?
In 2007 the Ethics Resource Center found that ethical standards had nose-dived back to where they were in 2000.
According to the 2007 National Business Ethics Survey®
“Over the past year, more than half (56 percent) of employees surveyed had personally observed violations of company ethics standards, policy, or the law. Many saw multiple violations. More than two of five employees (42 percent) who witnessed misconduct did not report it through any company channels…”
According to Dr. Patricia Harned, President of ERC,
“Employees at all levels have not increased their ‘ethical courage’ in recent years. The rate of observed misconduct has crept back above where it was in 2000. And employees’ willingness to report misconduct has not improved, either…”
The good news is that the rate of misconduct is cut by three-fourths at companies with strong ethical cultures, and reporting is doubled at companies with comprehensive ethics programs.”
Got that, “strong ethical culture”—not exactly the type of culture prevalent on Wall Street or in companies whose focus is making the numbers no matter what.
In fact, the only ‘no matter what’ that should be a part of your culture is along the lines of “we will adhere to both the letter and the spirit of the law and make ethical and moral decisions at all times no matter what.”
(Today continues a conversation initiated last Thursday and added to yesterday.)
Everybody lies about sex. Those who aren’t getting any say they are and those who are getting it where they shouldn’t deny it.
Governor Mark Sanford followed the same path of Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Rudy Giuliani, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Helen Chenoweth (the first woman) and many more.
But you know what?
I don’t care. At least, not about the sex—or even the lies. Even the lies under oath, because I don’t believe that an oath is going to change someone’s attitude about admitting something they don’t want to admit, it just adds another layer to the lie.
As Becky Robinson pointed out in her comment I could have just as easily used the Evangelical community—Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman, Jim Bakker, Lonnie Latham, Earl Paulk, Paul Crouch, Douglas Goodman, Frank Houston, etc., etc., etc. and, of course, the Catholic Church.
In his first comment he said, “If you reframe the context from leader to bureaucrat, then the ethical expectations change.”
Amen, Dan. To assume that an elected official or any person-out-front automatically possesses all the sterling qualities of a “leader” as defined by the media, pundits and leadership industry has no basis in fact.
The second point that hit me was, “The notion of “standards” etc. is often a set-up for failure.”
This is getting closer to what angers me so much.
Not the sex, not the lies, but the standards.
Standards that they defined, preached and worked so hard to shove down everyone’s throat—standards that not one of them has even come close to practicing.
Mark Sanford voted for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment citing a need for “moral legitimacy” as his reason. Now he cites the Bible and the story of David and Bathsheba as his reason for not resigning.
As to the apologies, are they for the action or for getting caught? Americans are so focused on the sex and accept the apologies so readily that the hypocrisy becomes mere background noise.
It’s the Richard Nixon mentality all over again. As Nixon said in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal,”
The reigning slogan these days for too many “leaders” seems to be “do as I say, not as I do,” which both angers and confuses their followers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan also said, “No question but what they’re hypocrites…of the worst kind. They made claims they didn’t follow through on. However, the issue parents (and grandparents, too) have to deal with is the education of your children.”
We’ll explore Dan’s thoughts and personal example of this in the next Leadership’s Future on Thursday. Please join us.
“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His [Livingston] situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. He lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”
“I think it would be much better for the country and for him [Livingston] personally (to resign). I come from the business side. If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.”
“What I find interesting is the story of David, and the way in which he fell mightily—fell in very, very significant ways, but then picked up the pieces and built from there.” (King David, who slept with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, had the husband killed, married the widow, but continued to ‘lead’.)
“Too many people in government seem to think they are above regular folks, and I said I would expect humility in the way each member of my team served—that they would recognize that the taxpayer is boss.”
“We as a party want to hold ourselves to high standards, period,”
I hope you’ll come back tomorrow as this conversation continues.
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.
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 DishonestyDay 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.
“The real character of the person can be known by what he does when nobody is watching. … Feudal culture is one where there is one set of rules for the king and another set of rules for the rest of the people. … What we are seeing is not the failure of entrepreneurship. It is the greed, ego and vanity of some super managers of some large corporations. That is not the essence of capitalism. Capitalism is all about creating an environment where individuals can leverage their innovation and their entrepreneurial abilities to create better and better opportunities.” –N.R. Narayana Murthy, Founder, Chairman and chief mentor, Infosys Technologies (Hindustan Times 4/19/09).
Satyam has shown that greed is a human condition, not just the province of the decadent West, reserved for various ‘leaders’ in developing countries or politicians in general.
Murthy’s thought that the real person surfaces when no one is watching are akin to the age old wisdom of Plato when he said, “In vino veritas” (In wine is truth).
And I think that in these two comments you find the real truth about anyone who aspires to positional or as-it-happens leadership.
Leadership isn’t about influence or vision; it’s not about how many follow you or heap kudos on your efforts. It isn’t even about honesty and authenticity—the leaders on Wall Street were both in their pursuit of profits.
It’s about what happens between you, yourself and your MAP at three o’clock in the morning when you’ve had too much to drink (real or metaphorical) and no one is looking.
Are there any basic attitudes that you can build into your company’s culture that will encourage, let alone mandate, ethical/moral behavior in the decision making process when ‘moral’ equates to risk?
“…moral dilemmas, the decision to tell the truth or to bury it entails a huge amount of risk and soul-searching. Viewed in that way, what we call “ethics” is really a set of decisions about which risk is easier to sleep with at night: opening up about an uncertain situation or trying to hide the worst of it from yourself and everyone else.”
There are three traits that must be deeply embedded in your culture are
Consciousness. This is also known as ingrained awareness of the ramifications of collective action.
Discipline. Neuroscience research over the last decade has demonstrated that continual, intensive focus changes the pattern of neurons within the human brain.
Empathy. When a company is truly empathetic, the recognition of the value of employees is just a starting point.
The quote above is from an article based on the video below; the speech was given this past January at a Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs seminar entitled “Top Risks and Ethical Decisions.”
For full details read the entire transcript as well as the article, they’re well worth your time.
Last Friday I wrote that ‘right’ and wrong’ were moving targets.
With the large number of companies that have been destroyed or severely damaged by behavior ranging from stupid through unethical to downright illegal there is a call for more ethics to be taught at ever level.
Everywhere you turn you hear people saying that we need more ethics, but ‘ethics’ have never been clear cut.
Actually, I think they’ve always been situational, fluid and simultaneously contradictory. Look at the definitions from dictionary.com
(used with a singular or plural verb) a system of moral principles: the ethics of a culture.
the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc.: medical ethics; Christian ethics.
moral principles, as of an individual: His ethics forbade betrayal of a confidence.
(usually used with a singular verb ) that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.
All of the descriptions use words with no absolute concrete meaning; sticking to my usual example, murder has always been considered wrong, but the definition of murder, even today, keeps changing and often isn’t agreed upon even within the same society, e.g., the pro-choice/anti-abortion war.
Now look at the first four definitions for moral, the usual synonym,
of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical: moral attitudes.
expressing or conveying truths or counsel as to right conduct, as a speaker or a literary work; moralizing: a moral novel.
founded on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than on legalities, enactment, or custom: moral obligations.
capable of conforming to the rules of right conduct: a moral being.
Same thing, there are no absolute terms with which to define it.
Perhaps, then, ethics should be defined by current law, but that certainly hasn’t worked. It’s far too easy to adhere to the letter of the law and totally ignore the spirit of it. That keeps you out of jail, but certainly doesn’t make you ethical.
As a friend said the other day, “An ethical man knows it’s wrong to cheat on his wife; a moral man doesn’t.”
Further, there can be conflicts between personal ethics and law, where adhering to one violates the other. Should law prevail or personal ethics? Whichever you choose, it’s because you agree on a subjective level.
People say that those decisions should be made for “the greater good.” Again, by whose definitions? I’m sure that Hitler believed his actions in “purifying the races” were for the greater good—as he saw it—however I, and a large number of other people, don’t agree.
But even though this example seems so black and white, you’ll find people who still agree with Hitler’s reasoning and work to carry it forward.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Ask anybody with a blog and they will tell you that while Akismet does a great job of catching spam, making sure that real comments weren’t also caught is a nuisance; especially if you let it go too long. Most spam comments are stupid, meaningless or boring, but lately one spambot has been leaving quotes, so I copied the last batch to share with you today; Plato’s and Asimov’s were pure serendipity from other places.
I read a review about a new 
Fudge, fib, prevaricate, lie.
As to the apologies, are they for the action or for getting caught? Americans are so focused on the sex and accept the apologies so readily that the hypocrisy becomes mere background noise.
“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His [Livingston] situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. He lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”
It’s about what happens between you, yourself and your 
Are there any basic attitudes that you can build into your company’s culture that will encourage, let alone mandate, ethical/moral behavior in the decision making process when ‘moral’ equates to risk?
![Rockwood, New York, New York [Public domain]](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Steffens.jpg){kind=link}