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Wikileaks, Credit-Card Companies, and Complicity
Filed under: activism, banking, corporate citizenship, ethics, finance, government, NGO, transparency |
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I was interviewed last night on CBC TV’s “The Lang & O’Leary Exchange” about Mastercard and Visa’s decision to stop acting as a conduit for donations to the controversial secret-busting website Wikileaks. [Here’s the show. I’m at about 15:45.] (For those of you who don’t already know the story, here’s The Guardian‘s version, which focuses on retaliation against Mastercard by some of Wikileaks’ fans: Operation Payback cripples MasterCard site in revenge for WikiLeaks ban. )
Basically, the show’s hosts wanted to talk about whether a company like Mastercard or Visa is justified in cutting off Wikileaks, and essentially taking a stand on an ethical issue like this.
Here’s my take on the issue, parts of which I tried to express on L&O. Now just to be clear, what follows is not intended to convince you whether you should be pro- or anti-Wikileaks. The question is specifically whether Mastercard and Visa, knowing what they know and valuing what they value, should support Wikileaks’s activities.
I think that, yes, Mastercard & Visa are justified in cutting off Wikileaks. And I don’t think that conclusion depends on arriving at a final conclusion about the ethics of Wikileaks itself. The jury is still out on whether the net effect of Wikileaks’ leaks will be positive or negative. Likewise it is still unclear whether Wikileaks’ activities are legal or not. And who knows? History may be kind to Wikileaks and its front-man, Julian Assange. The question is whether, knowing what we know now, it is reasonable for Mastercard & Visa to choose to dissociate themselves. I think the answer is clearly “yes.” The key here is entitlement: the secrets that Wikileaks is disclosing are not theirs to disclose. They don’t have any clear legal or moral authority to do so, and so Mastercard & Visa are very well-justified in declaring themselves unwilling to aid in the endeavour.
One question that came up in last night’s interview had to do with complicity. Is a company like Mastercard or Visa complicit in the activities of Wikileaks? The answer to that question is essential to answering the question of whether the credit card companies might have been justified in simply claiming to be neutral, neither endorsing nor condemning Wikileaks but merely acting as a financial conduit. I think the answer to that question depends on at least 3 factors.
- 1. To what extent does Mastercard or Visa actually endorse Wikileaks’ activities?
- 2. To what extent does Mastercard or Visa know about those activities? and
- 3. To what extent does Mastercard or Visa actually make Wikileaks’ activities possible? That is, what is the extent of their causal contribution? Do they play an essential role, or are they a bit player?
In terms of question #1, it’s worth noting the significance of the particular values at stake, here. Wikileaks stands for transparency and for publicizing confidential information. Visa and Mastercard stand for pretty much the exact opposite. Visa and Mastercard, like other financial institutions, are able to do business because so many people trust them with their financial and other personal information. And so the credit card companies are, of all the companies you can think of, pretty clearly among the least likely to be able to endorse Wikileaks’ tactics, whatever they think of the organization’s objectives.
It’s also worth noting the significance of the notion of “corporate citizenship,” here. That term is widely abused — sometimes it’s used to refer to any and all social responsibilities, broadly understood. But if we take the “citizenship” part of “corporate citizenship” seriously, then companies need to think seriously about what obligations they have as corporate citizens, which has to have something to do with their obligations vis-a-vis government. Regardless of how this mess all turns out, the charges currently being bandied about include things like “treason” and “espionage” and “threat to national security.” These are things that no good corporate citizen can take lightly.
Business Ethics and the “New York Times” Rule
Filed under: accountability, decision-making, ethics, stakeholders, transparency |
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On Monday, the front page of the New York Times featured at story about financial firms adjusting the timing of bonuses in response to anticipated changes in tax laws. I mention this story not because of the particular ethical issues involved, but because it was featured on the front page of The Times. How would you like your decision-making subject to that kind of scrutiny?
From some perspectives, ethics is simple: “do the right thing.” For others (especially for philosophers like myself) it is incredibly complex, involving an ongoing centuries-old debate between arcane theories like deontology, utilitarianism, social contract theory, virtue theory, and others. In-between, we see lots of bits of ethical wisdom bundled into rules of thumb for ethical decision-making. Some of them are useful, some are misleading.
The one I’d like to discuss briefly today is the so-called “Front Page of the Newspaper” test, or sometimes “The New York Times Rule.” In one of its standard versions, it gets stated this way: “never do anything you wouldn’t want to see reported on the front page of the New York Times.” Some versions have additional qualifiers. Some, for example, say that you shouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t want to see fairly reported on the front page. That qualifier rules out slanted or malicious reporting — there are presumably plenty of fully-justifiable behaviours that we wouldn’t want to see reported in a malicious way, on the front page of the NYT or anywhere else.
The first thing to say about the Newspaper Test is that it probably is a useful heuristic. Asking the question it poses at very least serves as an opportunity to pause and ask yourself whether the action you’re about to take is one that could withstand publicity and scrutiny.
But there are two clear problems with the Newspaper Test.
One problem is that it can seem to serve as an argument against actions that are actually perfectly ethical. John Hooker, in his book Business Ethics as Rational Choice, gives this example: Imagine you’re CEO of a large corporation, and due to tough economic times you’re forced to lay off several thousand employees. Imagine that some of those employees slide into clinical depression. Others become alcoholics and end up beating their children. Lives are ruined. You probably wouldn’t want all of that reported on the front page of the NY Times, but that doesn’t mean your choice was unethical. In fact, Hooker points out, it might have been the least-bad option available. The point here is that sometimes even ethically good decisions are ones that we wouldn’t want publicized, either because their negative consequences are more visible than their positive ones, or because the reasons behind those decisions are reasons that, despite being good reasons, would be difficult or even impossible to explain.
The other problem is that it can seem to condone behaviour that is actually unethical. Most obviously, it can let you go ahead with an unethical plan if you happen either to be either generally insensitive to bad publicity or blind to subtle ethical dimensions of the question at hand. The former possibility is pretty self-explanatory: some people (and some companies) just don’t seem to care what the public thinks of them, or believe themselves to be above all need for accountability. As an example of the latter possibility (ethical blindness), picture a company sending its CEO to Washington on a private jet, with the aim of asking for money, and being utterly oblivious to the idea that the public might find this unseemly. If you don’t recognize, or care, that someone might object to your decision, then conducting the Newspaper Test isn’t going to stop you from doing something you shouldn’t.
The thing to remember about the Newspaper Test is that, like so many other catchy rules of thumb, it is at best a heuristic, and not an algorithm. It doesn’t automatically crank out an answer that is both determinate and correct. What it really is is an ‘intuition pump.’ It is a way to force yourself to ask, as part of a well-rounded ethical decision-making process, whether your decision is one that, in principle, you could defend in public. The hidden strength of the Newspaper Test lies in the notion of accountability, i.e., of having to give reasons for your actions in order to make them understandable to society at large.
Deadly Crashes, “Agency Theory” & the Challenges of Management
Filed under: accountability, complexity, corporations, decision-making, employees, ethics, excuses, governance, management, product safety, quality, risk, technology |
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Sometimes for a corporation to “do the right thing” requires excellent execution of millions of tasks by thousands of employees. It thus requires not just good intentions, but good management skills, too.
For an example, consider the story of the crash of a Concorde supersonic jet a decade ago. The conditions leading up to the crash were complex, but one factor (according to the court) was negligence on the part of an aircraft mechanic. Whether (or to what extent) that mechanic’s employer is responsible for that negligence, and hence at least partly responsible for the crash, is a difficult matter.
Here’s the story Saskya Vandoorne, for CNN: Continental Airlines and mechanic guilty in deadly Concorde crash
The fiery crash that brought down a Concorde supersonic jet in 2000, killing 113 people, was caused partially by the criminal negligence of Continental Airlines and a mechanic who works for the company, a French court ruled Monday.
Continental Airlines was fined 202,000 euros ($268,400) and ordered to pay 1 million euros to Air France, which operated the doomed flight.
Mechanic John Taylor received a fine of 2,000 euros ($2,656) and a 15-month suspended prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter….
I don’t know the details of this story well enough to have any sense of whether the mechanic in this case really did act negligently. But what intrigues me, here, is the issue of corporate culpability. Note the difficulty faced by airline executives who (for the sake of argument) want desperately to achieve 100% efficiency and never, ever to risk anyone’s life. In order to achieve those goals, executives have to organize and motivate hundreds or perhaps thousands of employees. They need to design and administer a chain of command and a set of working conditions (including a system of pay) that is as likely as possible to result in all those employees diligently doing their very best, all of the time. That challenge is the subject of an entire body of political & economic theory known as “agency theory.”
Agency theory and the various mechanisms available to motivate employees in the right direction are things that every well-trained business student knows about, because those are central challenges of managing any corporation, or even any small team. What is recognized too seldom, I think, is just how central a role agency problems play in assessing and responding to ethical challenges in particular.
Four Myths About Business Ethics
Filed under: decision-making, definitions, economics, ethics, government |
Comments (2) Here are four important myths about business ethics. There are surely many myths about business ethics, but these 4 in particular cause trouble, and pose significant challenges for anyone trying to have a productive discussion about right and wrong in the world of business.
Myth #1. “Business ethics” is an oxymoron.
The idea that “business ethics” is somehow a contradiction in terms is based on a serious misunderstanding of what ethics is and what the world of commerce is like. Indeed, it’s much closer to the truth to say that the term “business ethics” expresses a redundancy, since commerce is quite literally impossible without ethics. Every single commercial transaction requires some level of trust, and without a shared commitment to some level ethical behaviour, you simply do not get trust. Indeed, economists are more than ready to point out the huge range of ethical norms that underpin the modern economy and make it run more efficiently.
Myth #2. Ethics is just a matter of opinion.
Again, false. While ethics does of course have something to do with having an opinion, it’s also about having opinions that you can defend to other people. While there certainly are a few really tough moral questions about which we might agree to disagree, we should also recognize that on many ethical issues there are better and worse answers. Poor answers to ethical dilemmas are typically rooted in factual mistakes and logical inconsistencies. We shouldn’t settle for those. We should talk them through. (And, as a I blogged recently, having an opinion doesn’t come to much if you can’t sell that opinion to others.)
Myth #3. There’s no such thing as “business ethics,” because ethics should be the same everywhere.
There are two main reasons why ethics, while essential to business, isn’t just exactly the same in business as it is in other domains of life.
First, business poses special challenges. The enormous productive capacity of corporations and other large organizations also brings the potential to do substantial harm, both to the lives of stakeholders and to the natural environment. So we face questions in the world of commerce that we just don’t face in other parts of our lives. Second, the special social role of business implies a tailor-made set of ethical principles. One of the defining characteristics of business is that it is competitive: companies are naturally driven to do better than others in their field. This kind of behaviour is socially beneficial — consumers benefit when companies compete vigorously to produce a better product, at a better price, than the other guy. In practice, we can really look at business ethics as having two importantly different components. One component consists of the rules needed to civilize a tough, competitive game. This part of business ethics essentially has to do with the norms-and-principles that ought to govern business’s behaviour with regard to outsiders. The other component of business ethics is about the ethical rules that ought to be embodied in relationships within the organization. Here, we do value cooperative behaviour; so managers work hard to shape corporate culture to enable employees to trust each other and to work together toward shared goals. Business is morally complex that way.
Myth #4. Business ethics is just a matter of laws and regulation.
This is not just false, but dangerous. The tendency to confuse ethics and law is tempting, especially in an age in which the business section of the newspaper increasingly refers to “ethics laws” and “ethics regulations.” But we shouldn’t be misled by that short-hand way of speaking. If you think about it for just a minute or two, there are in fact lots of ways in which law and ethics come apart. There are plenty of things that are legal but unethical; and there are also behaviours that are illegal, but arguably ethically OK. The short explanation for the fact that law & ethics don’t overlap perfectly is this: laws are made & enforced by government. But governments can’t be everywhere, and if they could, we wouldn’t want them to be!
These surely aren’t all the myths there are about business ethics. But these strike me as four that are particularly common, particularly troublesome, and particularly clearly wrong.
Ethics as Strategy and Marketing
Ethical decision-making can helpfully be thought of as a matter of strategy and of marketing. This way of framing ethics is, I think, likely to be particularly useful in talking about ethics with either MBA students or business executives.
First it is worth noting that there is of course a cynical sense in which ethics can be a matter of strategy and marketing, and that’s when companies adopt an ethical posture because they see it as a good strategic move or as a smart marketing maneuver. That’s a good topic, but it’s not what I’m talking about here.
What I’m talking about is the sense in which very often, in the world of business, acting on one’s ethical convictions requires that one think in terms of strategy and marketing. An example may help.
Picture yourself working in a team-based work environment. Now imagine that the team decides to adopt a particular course of action, but it is one that you, after careful consideration, sincerely believe to be ethically problematic. OK, so you’re pretty sure you’re right.
Now what?
Well, knowing that you’re right doesn’t do much to change things, at least not automatically.
First comes a strategic decision. You need to choose a strategy, a course of action tailored to the situation. At the most basic level, your first strategic decision is whether to act or not. Maybe you’ll decide that discretion is the better part of valour, and end up holding your tongue. Maybe the issue is too small to be worth rocking the boat. But if the issue is worth pursuing, you’ll need to decide on a strategy for doing so. The thing that makes strategic decision-making difficult is the thing that differentiates strategic decisions from other sorts of decisions, which is that strategic decisions are decisions that need to take into consideration the decision-making of other people or institutions. (The contrast, technically, is with what are called “parametric” decisions, decisions that need only take into account facts about the non-decision-making bits of the world, such as “what is the weather like today?” or “how much money is in my pocket?”) So, in making a strategic decision about whether and how to voice concerns, you will need to think carefully about how other people are behaving, and how they will react to you — in other words, you need to think about what their strategies are likely to be, which is no trivial problem. That is the essence of strategic decision-making.
Next comes a marketing decision. (For practical purposes, the marketing decision might not be separable from the strategic one, but I’ll separate them for discussion purposes here.) Once you’ve decided that your strategy will indeed be to voice your concerns, how will you actually broach the topic? At a team meeting, or by means of quiet discussion with one or more key team members? If you need to seek like-minded allies, who will they be? And what will your sales pitch be? Will you cautiously express moral doubt, or will you pound your fist on a desk and declare the current course of action “unacceptable”? And just what will you be trying to sell the team — a small-but-meaningful shift in course, or a total about-face? The point is that you have not just to arrive at an opinion, but to sell it, too.
What we see here is that ethics is more complicated than simply knowing (or figuring out) the right thing to do.
But what I think we also see here is one more way to connect ethics with issues that managers and MBA students already take seriously. It’s a way of pointing out that ethics is far from the “soft” topic it is often accused of being. As someone with a Ph.D. in philosophy, I know that ethics is far from “soft” because I know a fair bit about the incredibly technical theoretical literature on the topic. But to many in the world of business, ethics is considered soft (while accounting, for example, is hard — firmly rooted in concrete realities). Pointing out that solving practical problems in ethics requires, among other things, solving challenging problems in strategy and marketing is yet another way to attempt rescue ethics from unfortunate perceptions of the topic.
What do “Higher Standards” for Business Look Like?
Filed under: accountability, definitions, ethics, standards, values, white collar crime |
Leave a comment When we see what seems to be an increase in misbehaviour, we need to ask: is that because behaviour has gotten worse, or because expectations have gotten higher?
See this piece, by Theresa Tedesco, for Financial Post Magazine: Farther. Faster. Higher.
…Business leaders are on trial like never before. Public outrage over recent ethical crises and the dramatic failures of corporate governance, most notably the stunning collapse of Enron Corp. and the financial crisis of 2008, have fuelled assumptions that government and regulators are stepping in and that ethical standards of business must be on the rise as a result. Certainly, public awareness is heightened in the aftermath of spectacular corporate collapses. But are ethical standards actually getting higher as a result? Or are shareholders, employees and other stakeholders simply more aware of the moral considerations in the wake of these scandals and crises, considerations that are soon to be forgotten? Either way, the role of the modern CEO and other senior executives has become much more complex, driven almost reflexively by the velocity of change in social values, technology, regulation and, increasingly, public opinion….
(I’m also quoted, making a point I’ve made before, namely that business is more ethical today than it has ever been in the past.)
But there’s also an interesting philosophical question, here, about what counts as a “higher” standard.
In some cases, “higher standards” might actually mean that we attribute to business obligations in domains in which they previously were seen as having basically no obligations at all. Environmental concern might be one such domain. Once upon a time, pollution just wasn’t an issue. At even once pollution was “on the radar,” so to speak, specific types of pollution (e.g., CFC’s) still weren’t seen as important. In that sense, it’s clearly true that we see “higher standards” imposed, and observed, by business today.
A second kind of “higher standards” might involve stricter requirements for things like honesty and product safety and truth in advertising. Once upon a time, the rule really was “buyer beware.” That’s no longer the case. Social expectations, often backed by law, mean that businesses face (and generally adhere to) standards far higher than we’ve ever seen before in history.
A third kind of “higher standard” might have to do with social expectations with regard to the impact business has beyond its interactions with its own customers and employees. Now, it has long been the case that many businesses make social contributions through things like charitable donations. But today, it is utterly run-of-the-mill for companies to have CSR departments that consider not just things like charitable donations, but how to track and report on the business’s net social impact. This is yet another way in which businesses face, and face up to, higher expectations.
But there is also a fourth kind of higher standard, one which is less-obviously being met. And that is in the area of individual decision-making. When the average person (or the ethicist, for that matter) surveys the world of business, he or she still sees examples of bad behaviour — people lying, cheating, embezzling, and defrauding. Most of us get our data in that regard from the media, which is far from a fair accounting of the issue. But still, the cases are out there. And it’s in that sense that people are very fair to observe that, at very least, things don’t seem to be getting better, dammit. Then again, I know of no credible evidence that things are getting any worse in this regard.
I suspect different people mean different things when they talk about whether “ethical standards” are higher or lower in business today. I suspect that the first 3 kinds of “higher standards” above are the crucial ones, since I suspect that the 4th, which depends on the character of individual human beings, is less susceptible to long-term change on a population basis.
Intellectual Property and the Chilean Miners
Filed under: contract, ethics, honesty, intellectual property, international, law, profits, workplace safety |
Comments (1) Last month I posted about some Ethical Issues for the Chilean Miners. There, I pondered the moral force of the contract that the 33 trapped miners signed while still underground, promising each other to share equally the eventual profits of any future publicity. This month, I’m quoted in an article on that same topic, in Canadian Business. Here’s the online version: Intellectual property: Underground dealing in Chile, by Angelina Chapin
The story of “los 33,” the Chilean miners stuck underground for 69 days has all the makings of a good narrative: complication, action, mystery and a happy ending. Presciently, the miners made a pact while they were underground to share whatever profits come from telling their story and are rumoured to have decided to collectively author a book. According to The Guardian, they even had a lawyer send down a contract to make the “blood pact” legal, meaning when Hollywood producers come knocking, they’ll have a whole group to bargain with.
Not much is known about its content, but the circumstances under which the contract was signed have experts wondering about its validity and whether the specifics should be abided by now that they’ve survived the rescue….
The article gives the last word to Toronto-based lawyer Calin Lawrynowicz, who makes a simple, practical suggestion: rather than wonder about the force of the subterranean contract, the miners ought to sit down to talk about it:
Lawrynowicz says, since the miners don’t have 33 lawyers explaining their individual rights, the group should reconvene with an arbitrator to make amendments to the contract, allowing for reductions and benefits in terms of the wealth distribution.
“It’s like a shotgun wedding in Vegas,” he says. “You may be able to have a great relationship after the fact, but have to reconfirm why you got together in the first place.”
Can Employers Tell Employees What to Eat?
Filed under: discrimination, employees, ethics, food, values |
Comments (33) 
All companies want their employees to be team players. But just how far can companies go in requiring that employees ‘toe the line’? Can that demand extend to cultural or religious or moral or dietary requirements?
How As a starting point, consider this story, from CBC News: No meat on menu for Montreal purse maker
A Montreal accessories company has taken its policy of using no animal products beyond the rack and has forbidden its staff from eating meat and fish at work.
A former employee says the policy violated her rights as a non-vegetarian….
(I’ve blogged on unusual forms of employee discrimination before. See Discriminating Against the Non-Blind and “Smokers Need Not Apply”.)
So, is it OK for a company to require that its employees not eat meat? Now, to be more precise, the company in question isn’t forcing people to be vegetarians. It’s just insisting that they not eat meat on the premises. But still, the requirement is an imposition. If an employee loves bologna sandwiches, why should she not be allowed to eat them on her lunch break at work? On the other hand, it’s not exactly a brutal requirement: a place that forbids employees from eating meat is not exactly ipso facto a Dickensian sweatshop. Of course, you might say that the whole conflict could be avoided by careful hiring: only hire people who are willing to uphold the company ethos. But that still amounts to a form of discrimination — and we would still have to ask whether such discrimination is justified or not. Besides, we would still have to worry about cases in which an employee is a devout vegetarian at time of hiring, but then (for whatever reason) changes her dietary habits at some point after being hired.
Whatever your instincts about this particular case, it’s worth performing a consistency test on your own conclusion. Try this: if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, and sympathetic to the company’s no-meat policy, ask yourself whether you would reach the same conclusion if the tables were turned, and a meat-packing company required employees to eat meat and forbade vegetarianism. (“Why would a vegetarian work at a meat-packing plant?” Well, times are tough. Stranger things have happened!) If, on the other hand, you think the company in the story above is engaging in unjustifiable discrimination, ask yourself whether you would reach the same conclusion if the company was one whose product embodied some value that you hold dear — something to do with your own religious or philosophical or political beliefs. That kind of consistency test is a good way to double-check that the conclusion you reach with regard to this particular case is rooted in good reasons, or whether instead your conclusion is based on an undefended bias.
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Addendum:
A couple of people have told me my counter-example above is unrealistic — after all, what employer is going to tell you you have to eat meat? That misses the point I was making, which was to suggest to people that we should think up some counter-example that involves some set of values that would challenge what seems to us to be the “obvious” conclusion, here. If you don’t like my example, feel free to suggest one!
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Thanks to NW for the story.
Business Ethics Blog’s 5th Blogaversary
Five years ago today, I posted my very first blog entry. It had no real substance, but it was a start. Five years later, I’m still blogging. And given that the average lifespan of a blog is something less than the average lifespan of a fruit fly, I think I now get to call myself a veteran blogger.
Over the last five years, I’ve written over 720 blog entries. I’ve written on topics big and small and ridiculous. I’ve written about the collapse of major financial institutions, and ethical issues for small business, and monkeys working as waiters and the ethics of soccer balls. I’ve written about the auto industry, the wind industry, and the donut industry. I’ve written things that were pretty uncontroversial, as well as things that no one agreed with. And in terms of topics, I’ve covered environmental ethics, workers’ rights, corporate governance, and much more. And my audience has been just as varied. I know for a fact that this blog is read by corporate insiders, by CSR consultants, and by professional colleagues and their students.
And in case you’re wondering, my 3 most popular blog entries from 2010 happen all to be about disasters:
- BP and Corporate Social Responsibility
- Boycotting BP is Futile and Unethical
- Should Trapped Miners Be Paid?
Thanks to all of you who keep reading, commenting, and encouraging. Knowing that you’re out there, reading and reflecting, is what makes this blog worth writing.
MBA Ethics Education: Speaking Up
This is the fourth (and final?) installment in a series of postings on ethics education for MBA students.
The fourth element of MBA ethics education that I want to talk about is the willingness and ability to speak up.
Often one of the biggest barriers to doing the right thing lies in not knowing what to do or say in a hierarchical or group context. Think first of hierarchies. Pretty much all organizations are hierarchical in nature, with each individual answerable to, and performing tasks assigned by, someone in the layer above. In such contexts, when your performance evaluations (and maybe your very job) relies on your boss’s perceptions of you, it can be pretty tough to “speak truth to power,” as the saying goes, even when your conscience says you should. Next think of groups. Business involves a lot of teamwork — a lot of MBA education revolves around that fact — and on teams there can be pressure to conform, to go with the flow, to be a ‘team player.’ But more often than not, if something unethical is about to be done, and least one person on the team realizes that it’s wrong. The question in such cases is whether that one person will have what it takes to speak up. Part of MBA ethics education should be aimed at giving people what it takes to do so.
At a first approximation, I’d say that speaking up when you see something unethical (or maybe just something thoughtless, with potentially bad consequences) requires three things.
First, you need the understanding — the ethical sensitivity, if you will — to notice that something is wrong.
Second, you need to be motivated — you need to care, and you need the courage to act in the face of the pressures of hierarchy and teamwork. You need some understanding of just what your obligations really are. (Among other things, this requires a refusal to indulge in self-serving excuses.)
Third, you need the skills to actually formulate and voice an objection. You need to know things like how to express ethical doubts in a non-threatening way. You need to know how to seek out allies who might share your ethical qualms. And you need a vocabulary in which to express your concerns. In these regards, I highly recommend a book from which I’ve learned a lot, namely Mary Gentile’s recent book, Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right. It is a truly wise piece of writing, and “wise” is not a word I use very much.
None of this is intended to exaggerate the complexity of the simple act of raising one’s voice. But all the available evidence suggests that at least sometimes (and likely too often) it actually is difficult, in organizational settings, to speak up when we get the sense that something isn’t right. And (as discussed in a previous blog entry) it’s just not plausible to think that the people who fail to speak up are all somehow morally defective. Too often, bad things happen because good people don’t speak up. We need to make sure that MBA students (and, surely, others too) graduate with the skills to do so.
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