Tom Peters on Excellence
Tom Peters
Ethics is a hot business topic, and that is a potential boon to us all. Unfortunately, the heightened awareness has spawned an industry of mindless, ‘‘do good, be good’’ writings. But dealing with ethics is not so easy.
- Ethics is not principally about headline issues – responding to the Tylenol poisoning or handling insider information. Ethical concerns surround us all the time, on parade whenever we deal with people in the course of the average day. How we work out the ‘‘little stuff’’ will determine our response, if called upon, to a Tylenol sized crisis. When disaster strikes, it’s far too late to seek out ethical touchstones.
- High ethical standards – business or other wise – are, above all, about treating people decently. To me (as a person, business person, and business owner) that means respect for a per son’s privacy, dignity, opinions, and natural desire to grow; and people’s respect for (and by) co workers.
- Diversity must be honored. To be sure, it is important to be clear about your own compass heading; but don’t ever forget that other people have profoundly different – and equally decent – ethical guidance mechanisms.
- People, even the saints, are egocentric and selfish; we were designed ‘‘wrong’’ in part from the start. Any ethical framework in action had best take into account the troublesome but immutable fact of man’s inherently flawed character.
- Corporations are created and exist to serve people – insiders and outsiders – period.
- By their very nature, organizations run roughshod over people. Organizations produce powerlessness and humiliation for most participants, with more skill than they produce widgets.
- Though all men and women are created equal, some surely have more power than others. Thus, a central ethical issue in the workplace (and beyond) is the protection of and support for the unempowered – especially the frontline worker and the customer.
- For employees and managers alike, fighting the impersonal ‘‘they’’/‘‘them’’ (the/every bureaucratic institution) is almost always justified on ethical grounds.
- While one can point to ethically superior (and profitable) firms, such as Herman Miller, most of us will spend most of our working life in compromised – i.e., politicized – organizations. Dealing with ‘‘office politics,’’ ‘‘brown nosing,’’ etc., is a perpetual ethical morass. A ‘‘pure’’ ethical stance in the face of most firms’ political behavior will lead you out the door in short order, with only the convent, monastery, or ashram as alternatives. The line between ethical purity and arrogant egocentricism (i.e., a holier than thou stance toward the tumult of everyday life) is a fine one.
- Though I sing the praises of an ‘‘action bias,’’ ethical behavior demands that we tread somewhat softly in all of our affairs. Unintended consequences and the secondary and tertiary effects of most actions and policies far outnumber intended and first order effects. As a manager, and a ‘‘change agent,’’ dropping out may be the only decent/ethical path; our best intended plans so often cause more harm than good. (Think about it: leaving the world no worse off than when you arrived is no mean feat.)
- The pursuit of high ethical standards in business might well be served by the elimination of many business schools. The implicit thrust of most MBA programs is that great systems and great techniques win out over great people.
- Can we live up to the spirit of the US Bill of Rights in our workplaces? Can ‘‘good business ethics’’ and ‘‘good real life ethics’’ – and profit – coincide on a routine basis? One would hope that the answer is yes, although respect for the individual has hardly been the cornerstone of Ameri can industry’s traditional approach to its workforce.
- Capitalism and democracy in society are messy. But capitalism has far fewer downsides and far more upsides than any alternative so far concocted. The same can be said for the firm – where ‘‘democracy’’ and ‘‘capitalism’’ are served by wholesale worker participation and wide spread ownership.
- Great novels, not management books, might help. There are no easy answers, but there are fertile fields for gathering ideas. If you wish to be appropriately humbled about life and relationships and the possibility of ethical behavior, read Dostoyevsky, Forster, or Garcia Marquez instead of Drucker, Blanchard, or Peters. Then reconsider your latest magisterial proclamation.
- Each of us is ultimately lonely. In the end, it’s up to each of us and each of us alone to figure out who we are, who we are not, and to act more or less consistently on those conclusions.
Anyone who is not very confused all the time about ethical issues is out of touch with the frightful (and joyous) richness of the world. But at least being actively confused means that we are actively considering our ethical stance and that of the institutions we associate with. That is a good start. (1989 TPG Communications. All rights reserved.)
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