Ethics and Values: September 2006 Archives

The results from a new study on cheating among MBA students conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University is quite disheartening. From Bloomberg.com:

The study found 56 percent of MBA students acknowledged cheating....The study offered two main explanations for the cheating: the pressure-cooker atmosphere of business school leaves many students willing to compete by any means available, and corporate scandals have distorted the standards of many business students.

So what these students are telling us is that the "ends justify the means" and "I might as well get started cheating now, because that is what I will need to do in corporate America."

Another study found that more than 70% of undergraduate business students admit to cheating.

Corporate America has helped to corrupt our culture with all of its scandals. My only hope is that the entrepreneurial generation will create a new breed of American business leaders that seeks to do well in business without sacrificing their integrity. That is why we need to infuse not just legalistic ethics, but morality and values into business education.

I have made some recent posts about the new book I am writing with Mike Naughton from the University of St. Thomas. It comes out of the work we did developing a class that examined the process of starting and building a business from the perspective of Christian social teaching. The class won a national award (as an entrepreneurship class) and resulted in the two of us writing several scholarly pieces related to our work together. Too often traditional approaches to business ethics are from a legalistic or a morally relativistic perspective. We believe that morality should guide our ethical decisions.

Our book brings the message of how faith can inform, guide and ground the formation and development of new ventures, to the entrepreneurs who are leading today's entrepreneurial economy. We offer entrepreneurs both a moral perspective and practical tools that they can use in their businesses. We organize the book around the four cardinal virtues from Aquinas: Justice, Prudence, Courage, and Temperance.

Justice can come to life through innovative compensation, benefit, and profit-sharing programs. What we accomplish in our businesses is only because of the support and efforts of many other people who deserve a share of our successes. Prudence is practiced by being intentionally careful stewards of the gifts we have to work with -- our talents, other people's money, the labor of our workers, and so forth. Courage is not just the intestinal fortitude to start the business, but staying true to our vision and values to build a better place to work and become a profitable business. Temperance is understanding our wholeness as people. As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is a risk in viewing your career as a noun.

We want to find a business publisher for this book, but there seems to be an uneasiness with overtly bringing God and faith into how we do our work as entrepreneurs. I have heard this uneasiness, this uncomfortableness, in the voices of some of the editors as we have explained our book.

This agnosticism also applies to how others think we should live our lives in today's culture. The jounalist Fred Barnes recently told a story about a famous liberal who came face to face with the reality that many want God out of our culture:

Back in the early 1990s when I was still at The New Republic, I was invited to a dinner in Washington with Mario Cuomo. He was then governor of New York, and had invited several reporters to dinner because he was thinking about running for president. At one point that night he mentioned that he sent his children to Catholic schools in New York because he wanted them to be taught about a God-centered universe. This was in the context of expressing his whole-hearted support for public schools. But from the reaction, you would have thought he had said that one day a week he would bring out the snakes in his office and make policy decisions based on where they bit him. He was subsequently pummeled with stories about how improper it was for him, one, to send his kids to religious schools, and two, to talk about it. (Imprimis, Hillsdale College).

Our values and our faith should inform our actions because all that we do, be it in our families, our businesses, or our communities, shape our character. I know we will soon find a good publisher, but it is sad that in our culture we have become so quick to compartmentalize God and faith from everyday life.

Every virtue has two ditches that take it beyond virtue and into vice: one ditch is deficiency and the other one is excess. Courage, which is a commonly used virtue for entrepreneurs, is no exception.

Take for example Andre Agassi. What a wonderful career he has had in tennis, winning eight major tournaments that included a career grand slam.

This past weekend he played his last US Open. The word courage seemed to come up every five minutes on TV and in every story written about his efforts this year. For those of you who are not tennis or even sports fans, Agassi played this last year with a severely injured back. But, he played on, in spite of his father publicly stating that he should not.

He was touted as a hero. "Give Agassi credit, he retired swinging", was one headline.

While he has shown great courage in the past with his comebacks, playing through injuries, and with his incredible work ethic, this weekend Agassi went beyond courage and into the vice of recklessness. Even the commentators who marveled at his "courage," would say in the next breath that this last tournament could cause serious permanent physical injury.

So why did he go on? It was not the money -- he and his wife have more than they can spend. It was not to win another major -- even Agassi knew he could not win again in a major.

Sadly, I think society has convinced many of us that being Herculean even when there is no hope of success is somehow noble and good. But this is not true. Every virtue, even courage has limits.

There are good lessons here for the entrepreneur. When taken too far, risk taking can become reckless. Staying with a deal or sticking with a major decision even when it is clear that the best course of action is to move on is not courage, it is recklessness. Taking risk just for the sake of taking risk is not courage, it is recklessness.

Courage has two ditches. And Andre Agassi strayed off the road of courage into the ditch of recklessness.