“It’s Smart to Be Ethical—Integrity Pays!” proclaimed the lavish, gold-inked advertisement in Publishers Weekly. How clever—promoting ethical business practices by appealing to the profit motive!
Actually, The Power of Ethical Management, by coauthors Kenneth Blanchard (The One-Minute Manager) and Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), delivers more and better than its ad promises. Under its superficial tone, the book, which is due to reach bookstores next month, hides a fairly sophisticated analysis that set us thinking.
Is it possible to be ethical and survive in the business world? According to one consultant in corporate ethics education, most managers in aerospace and defense industries have a strong sense of right and wrong. And those managers feel guilty much of the time. The incredible pressures of doing business—especially in industries that rely heavily on large government contracts—brings the survival instinct to the surface. One branch of our government puts pressure on these companies to deliver honest bids and compete fairly. Another branch pressures them to promise more and faster and for less than they can reasonably expect to deliver.
The Peale and Blanchard message may be just what these managers need to hear: Operating in a fair, legal, and self-respecting manner will not ruin you or your company. And in the long run, it will probably help. This message is pitched perfectly for the functionally pragmatic mood of American business. We are, after all, a nuts-and-bolts kind of nation that does not want to be bothered very much with theories. Just tell us what works.
But there is something else managers (and the rest of us) need to grasp. Our consultant reports that the very managers who have a solid sense of right and wrong are reluctant to defend their convictions. The tolerant ethic of relativism has so permeated our culture that even those who believe in right and wrong will apologetically explain that their ideas of morality are, after all, just preferences (like one person’s taste for broccoli or another’s preference for slasher movies), and that they certainly would not want to impose them on anyone else.
It is that kind of thinking that surrenders to the inevitability of deception, payoffs, and kickbacks even before the first blast of the battle horn has been sounded.
Fighting these two ideas—that integrity is an unaffordable luxury and that morality is mere preference—is imperative. And we are glad that the 60-second positive thinkers are leading the charge. Beyond that, we need to help people build moral fiber so they can choose to do right even when it is not profitable. And we must help them understand the message of grace: The Grand Outcome is not in their control after all, so they are free to ignore the pressure to subordinate ethics to the bottom line and free to shed the guilt as well.
By David Neff.
