Mary C. Gentile - Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right

MARY C. GENTILE

How to Speak

Your Mind When You

Know Whats Right

Yale
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.

The Preface is reprinted, with revision, from the February 5, 2009, issue of BusinessWeek by special permission, copyright 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright 2010 by Mary C. Gentile.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by Sonia Shannon
Set in Minion by Integrated Publishing Solutions
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books,
Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gentile, Mary C.
Giving voice to values : how to speak your mind when you know whats right / Mary C. Gentile.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-16118-2 (alk. paper)
1. Business ethics. 2. Leadership. 3. Values. I. Title.
HF5387.G464 2010
174dc22 2010011905

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all those who would like to voice their values
rather than wonder whether they can

Whether you were among those who lauded the clarity of President Barack Obamas Inaugural Address in 2009 or those who bemoaned its lack of quotable quotes, you most likely heard his call for an era of responsibility loud and clear. In fact, when he turned to the topic of greatest concern for the electoratethe economic downturnhe plainly stated that the nations woes were the result not only of greed and irresponsibility on the parts of some but also, and more important for the path out of this mess, of the collective failure to make hard choices by the rest of us.

The credit market meltdown and governance misbehavior had, once again, triggered conversations among business leaders, business educators, and the business press about just what they were communicating and teaching in the halls of industry, in corporate training seminars, and in business schools. After all, you didnt have to look far to find a lot of highly trained and highly placed managers doing a perp walk. Even more disconcerting were all those business school graduates who may not have crossed the legal line but who had presided over, or at least given silent assent to, a stream of decisions that led to the collapsing dominoes of the worldwide financial system.

What we cannot afford, however, is for businesses and business education to respond to this internal and external critique in the same way we have responded to scandals in the past. It is no longer acceptable to merely bemoan the problem of a few bad apples and then focus on preparing future business leaders to develop awareness of the kinds of ethical breaches they might encounter in their careerspresumably so they can recognize them in time to choose not to work for those bad actors and thereby avoid the problem.

The other most common approach is to focus on the difficulty of reasoning our way through knotty and challenging ethical dilemmas where the answers are not black and white but many shades of gray. The focus is on those big, thorny issues where reasonable and intelligent people of goodwill may quite understandably disagree, and often do. These case studies can trigger what one Harvard professor called ethics fatigue. The training and educational focus is on analysis and the ethical reasoning models that philosophers have probed for centuries: duty-based decision making, rights-based decision making, utilitarian decision making, and so on.

Unfortunately, whether future managers find such discussions intellectually engaging or tedious and irrelevant, too often all they learn is how to frame an argument to justify virtually any position no matter how cynical or self-serving. Utilitarianism, after all, is tailor-made for a free-market economy. I remember one CEO who told me that while interviewing a recent MBA graduate for a job, he asked the man whether he had taken a course in business ethics. When the interviewee answered yes, the CEO asked him what he had learned. The job candidate explained that he had learned about all the models of ethical analysisdeontology, virtue ethics, consequentialism, and so onand that whenever he encountered a conflict, he could decide what he wanted to do and then select the model of ethical reasoning that would best support his choice. Needless to say, this was probably not the intended lesson of the class.