Some bad actions seem to have a much longer tail than others and are more personal.

The length of the tail also seems related to how much the breach affects “people like me.”

The proof of this is happening right now and playing out in social media. It started with the addition of a Wikipedia board member.

Nearly 200 Wikipedia editors have taken the unprecedented step of calling for a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors to be tossed out. (…)  “In the best interests of the Wikimedia Foundation, Arnnon Geshuri must be removed from his appointment as a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation Board.”

Geshuri played a central role in the “no poach” scandal (where a number of top companies, like Apple and Google, agreed not to recruit from each other) that has had lasting effects on countless careers.

Although I’ve said many times that past performance does not predict the future and I firmly believe in second chances there are caveats.

One is that the the person agrees it was wrong, takes responsibility for their share of the action and accepts some kind of punishment — whether a monetary fine, jail time or just a public statement.

When it’s an ethical lapse, as in this case, I consider if the person should have known better — which Geshuri should have.

However, this wasn’t just an ethical lapse; both the scheme and his actions were illegal.

And there is no question that as a high ranking HR professional he did know it was both illegal and unethical and was in an excellent position to assess the long-term damage it would do.

Geshuri was actively involved along with facilitating others.

Therefore, I tend to agree with the editors that he doesn’t belong in an organization that runs of pure trust.

But I am just as sure he still has a great career path in most of corporate America, where they would understand (and in some cases even condone) what he did, as well as in politics, where both the criminal and civil breaches would just be business as usual.

Image credit: Myleen Hollero / Wikimedia Foundation

I 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

Usually, when people talk about “too big to fail” they are referring to financial institutions and insurance companies.

But what happens when a company is too big to reign in? When it does what it wants and wields so much political clout that investigations seem to evaporate?

Walmart is such a company.

But maybe this time they will have to answer for their actions.

Because, fortunately, it is The New York Times that has been doing the investigating, not a government entity or by Wal-Mart—the internal investigation was shut down by company executives when the evidence wasn’t in their favor—and has been ongoing for years.

It seems that much of Walmart’s global growth in Mexico and other countries has been fueled by bribes.

Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance — public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.

In a statement a Walmart spokesman said, “We are committed to having a strong and effective global anticorruption program everywhere we operate and taking appropriate action for any instance of noncompliance.”

But actions speak louder than words and Walmart’s actions are a case study of leadership failure in the home office—all the way to the top.

But Wal-Mart’s leaders did not tell Mexican authorities about his allegations, not even after their own investigators concluded there was “reasonable suspicion” to believe laws had been violated, records and interviews show.

It seems similar tactics were used in India and China, too.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a federal law that makes it a crime for American corporations or their subsidiaries to bribe foreign officials and the Justice Department and SEC Have started their own investigations.

As the investigations unfold it will be interesting to see if a corporation can, indeed, be so big that it’s above the law.

On a related topic.

One more thought for those who believe that newspapers are no longer relevant.

I seriously doubt that any Internet media company, let alone a blogger, could or would have mounted this investigation and stuck with it—nor can this story be told in 140 character spurts.

No matter what happens we owe a debt to The New York Times.

Flickr image credit: The New York Times and Walmart

In a series of studies, Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely found that inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative people. Furthermore, they showed that inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior. HBS Working Knowledge

Not good news when your goal is to increase creativity in your people, but not really surprising.

When we think actively, we see more possibilities, and that includes ways to gain an advantage – a survival mechanism. When we think passively, we don’t see the possibilities, so we follow the rules. –Deb Pekin, Change Manager, Kraft Foods Inc (from a comment)

Creativity isn’t a faucet that can be turned off when it’s inconvenient—it’s part of a person’s MAP; it’s who they are, so they will apply it across the board.

“Dan and I are of the hope that managers will start thinking about how to structure the creative process in such a way that they can keep ethics in check, triggering the good behavior without triggering the bad behavior.”

That’s one approach.

Perhaps a better one is to build a strong ethical culture first and overlay it with a culture that encourages creativity and innovation.

One of the most important things is to make sure that unethical behavior is not tolerated, let alone rewarded; in fact, in some cases it should be terminated.

Of course, that means ethics would trump expediency; not the most common scenario in modern business.

Flickr image credit: zedbee

With News Corp’s culture making headlines around the world (and links to plentiful to choose) I was reminded of something I read recently about a new ethics compliance study (free registration required).

The new outlook has permeated the boardroom. In fact, only 22% of ethics and compliance leaders worry about senior management’s ability and desire to demonstrate and promote ethical conduct. Sixty-eight percent of the respondents stated that promoting an ethical culture creates long-term value for the business.

In fact, 45% of respondents are concerned that middle managers are not as invested in ethics initiatives as their superiors.
Think about this; senior management is ethical, but the guys in the middle area are the problem.

Funny, in almost all the ethics cases over the last few decades it’s been senior management that was the driving force and found to be at fault.

Most people respond to the tone and example set by their leaders.

But too often the goals and the pressure to achieve them reflect an unwritten message from senior executives—use whatever means necessary, just get it done.

I’ve never seen any statistics, but I’ll bet that if middle managers are guilty of anything it’s going too far to produce the results demanded of them by their bosses who are, in turn, responding to Wall Street.

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

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

1. (used with a singular or plural verb) a system of moral principles: the ethics of a culture.
2. the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc.: medical ethics; Christian ethics.
3. moral principles, as of an individual: His ethics forbade betrayal of a confidence.
4. (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,

1. of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical: moral attitudes.
2. expressing or conveying truths or counsel as to right conduct, as a speaker or a literary work; moralizing: a moral novel.
3. founded on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than on legalities, enactment, or custom: moral obligations.
4. 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.

In 2007 research from Harvard Business School showed the wide gap between what we think/say and what we actually do.

In that light “more ethics” becomes somewhat problematical.

What do you think the answer to being “more ethical” is?

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The best dressed Wall Street leaders

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Considering the business news for the last decade the title of this week’s quotes is more of an oxymoron.

And, IMCO (in my cynical opinion), it’s not over yet. I think more schemes, more unethical if not downright illegal actions and a whole lot more stupidity are going to surface globally before we get out of this tunnel.

With that in mind I offer up these insights to the human psyche.

There are two levers to set a man in motion, fear and self-interest. –Napoleon Bonaparte (He should know.)

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. –John Maynard Keynes (That was then, now the wicked men do wicked things sans greatest good for anyone but them.)

Corporation, n., An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility. –Ambrose Bierce (But it doesn’t have to be that way.)

Earnings can be pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them.–Warren Buffett (Can you say derivatives, Madoff and hedge funds?)

If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. –Robert Noyce (We really didn’t need anyone to prove Noyce’s wisdom.)

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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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