The last few years have been a tale of two disasters – one financial, the other political – both characterized by moral failures that have undermined public trust in our systems of power. For these were not just crises of illegality, but of the morality of individuals, businesses, institutions and governance structures. Structures which have been exposed as, flawed, or more shockingly, non-existent. This has ignited a call to re-inject the vocabulary of morals into public discourse and place human values at the center of public policy.

Yet people are reluctant to talk about ethics and morality because it feels like pontificating in a world in which many no longer accept a pontiff. Ethics and morality are seen as tarred with the same brush of gobbledegook as religion.

How do we found this vital discussion on this world not the next? By using language that recognizes that some things are simply good and others simply intolerable, that addresses these issues as absolutes not the mere subset of one's taste in supernatural belief.

Lucy's story

This simple truth – that some things are good and others intolerable – was brought home to me yet again by the recent experience of my youngest daughter, Lucy. I am pleased to say that a willingness to stand firm against what can't be right seems to characterize all our children. But the most disturbing thing about Lucy's story is that it may be all too typical of the experience of many employees in today's business world.

Lucy decided not to go the University route. Instead, she left school after AS levels and took a series of jobs as a sales person, starting in pubs and shops, then door-to-door, telephone-sales, selling insurance and eventually as a recruitment consultant for a major international professional service firm, where she was far ahead of any of their graduate intake and a top performer, becoming someone everybody knew in her particularly niche, the construction industry... all by 22!

This attracted the attention of a direct competitor (I will call them XYZ Corporation, she has agreed not to talk about this, I haven't), who bombarded her with job offers for more than a year. Eventually she succumbed to a major salary increase and in less than six months became XYZ Corporation's top-selling sales person... whereupon her (male) boss hit on her saying that she must transfer £100 to his personal bank account for each sale... if she wanted to keep her job. Just a little sum, to start with.

Lucy has a huge sense of fair play and consulted the Finance Director, who recommended that she report it. Which she did via the company's Human Resources people and her boss's boss (a woman).

Unsurprisingly maybe, Lucy was summarily dismissed on the outright lie that her performance was unsatisfactory. Lucy is a canny lass, kept all the records, and wrote to the CEO of XYZ Corporation, at his home as well as office address, but got no reply. So she decided to pursue it under the UK's whistle-blower legislation. Fortunately, knowing the insurance game, she had taken out legal insurance for unfair dismissal to support a mortgage loan and did not have to worry about the legal costs she was racking up.

The advice Lucy got from the Police is that private whistle-blower cases almost never succeed because the corruption invariably goes so deep in the offending organisation. (I addressed the lack of interest in the UK Police in solving crime, especially fraud, in my last newsletter.) Her legal-insurance solicitor was pretty weak but she picked up a good barrister, and XYZ Corporation – who obviously thought she would back down as the costs mounted – did a sloppy job of fabricating their “evidence”.

Initial offers of help from co-workers at XYZ Corporation evaporated when she was fired. So, to support her case, Lucy had to locate six other former XYZ Corporation employees who were similarly intimidated but had paid up to keep their jobs, and she got copies of their relevant bank statements.

Eventually, after six months of the usual legal foot dragging and procrastination, there was some kind of pretrial review with the Whistle-blower Tribunal at which the judge, who must have been struck by the obvious injustice, said he hoped this case would come to court. Thereupon XYZ Corporation upped their offer and Lucy settled out of court for £18 thousand, not a vast sum but she didn't want to appear greedy and had had enough. The total including legal costs for her and XYZ Corporation's lawyers was estimated to exceed £60 thousand. In the process, Lucy's former boss and boss's boss left XYZ Corporation.

God knows how many more had been victimized or how widespread this middle-management racket was (or still is) in that organization.

Perhaps the one thing that is exceptional about Lucy's experience is that she in some sense “won”, although the trauma and disillusion was by no means trivial. This is what people in the UK (and elsewhere) now face: the phenomenon of widespread fraud (“cappuccino crime”) committed by middle-mangers struggling to make ends meet in this recession (protection rackets like this one, fraudulent expense claims, like the UK's Members of Parliament, obscene bonuses of bankers driven by conspiracies to generate phony numbers, the quarterly earnings game, and so on).

It is therefore terribly important that organizations take responsibility for policing the ethical and moral standards of their own people.

Teaching ethics

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) believed that the young need good examples to help them understand standards and to learn how to behave virtuously. As a person grows so they develop their own standards and begin to feel shame without a role model, internalizing their own sense of ethics and morality, one that prizes virtue for its own sake with no thought of reward or punishment.

Mary Warnock, a leading British philosopher and writer on morality, education and the mind, also emphasizes the importance of parents and teachers in instilling notions of ethics and morality. She believes that the habit of of seeking out the moral implications of what we do needs to be ingrained in early life.

However, for Warnock, though teaching ethics and morality is a job for both parents and teachers, the burden increasingly falls to teachers. Many parents, she believes, provide poor role models by acting as though personal gain trumps all other values. There is a contemporary assumption that busy, ambitious, hard-working people can't be expected to demonstrate restraint in the pursuit of personal success... it is seen as a sign of weakness.

And even if, in their personal life, many agree that “honesty is the best policy.” Honesty in business is seen as a revolutionary concept, is said to be impractical and often equated with failure.

Honesty in business is more than the absence of fraud; it means that statements and promises about goods and services are accurate, and that misunderstandings are promptly and carefully remedied. Statements that are inaccurate, vague or confusing and actions that do not compare with words are less than honest.

Nevertheless, media promote the myth that mysteriousness, ruthlessness, and existing solely for profit make good business sense. Deceptive advertising, deceptive pricing and secrecy about employee wages are the norm.

Thus it is significant that MIT's Sloan School of Management are working on launching their first Ethics Module as part of the core curriculum at MIT this October. During the first half, it will look at two cases that have recently been in the news, using an ethical framework to analyze them. For the second half, it uses the Giving Voice to Values approach, originally developed at the Aspen Institute. This  helps students figure out and practice how to speak up for their values within the organization. It uses role plays and stories of personal experiences to experiment with approaches to doing so.

This year was one that started amid discourse on business scandals in the marketplace, causing us to rethink—and reaffirm—how and what we teach. As we look ahead at curriculum modifications, we see no tradeoff between developing leaders who are effective and leaders who are principled. We must integrate a concern for ethics and values, for responsibility and professional behavior, throughout the curriculum. We want our graduates to be able to recognize and think through situations with an ethical dimension and to make considered decisions based on recognition of professional standards and high expectations of themselves.

Dean, MIT Sloan School Of Management

Bottom Line?

Lucy did speak up, but even that was not enough.  Her story is a reminder that legal action is sometimes necessary, as well.

Whatever we choose to believe, the ethical and moral imperative to make things better rather than worse is a command that comes from us, from humanity itself, not an outside agency.

Homo Sapiens is a gregarious species. Without ethics and morality, our society and the rule of law won't survive.

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