Lily Zheng - The Ethical Sellout: Maintaining Your Integrity in the Age of Compromise

Praise for The Ethical Sellout

Lily Zheng and Inge Hansen have written a new guidebook on the importance of managing and maintaining ones integrity as we work to navigate what they call the age of compromise. I coach LGBTQ leaders and professionals on the importance of being truly authentic to oneself in all aspects of life. Zheng and Hansen wrap this all up in their book. I especially love the last line of their manifesto: Commit to being open to flexibility, growth, and exploration, to take up space in the world, and to live life with integrity. Authenticity is key in everything we do and become! This is a must-read!

David P. Whittleton, life and leadership coach and founder of Whittleton Consulting

The Ethical Sellout is an honest exploration of the inevitable gray areas in which marginalized people find themselves in todays society. The book is a push-and-pull dance between the impossible pressure for absolutism shouldered by marginalized people and the need for accountability in the midst of small and big compromises. The authors take us on a journey beyond justification for our choices to creating breathing room for our complex lives to be held with compassion, accountability, and possibility.

Michelle Kim, cofounder and CEO, Awaken

From college admissions scandals to exposs on organizations like Theranos, it is easy to point out where ethics have jumped the track. But what about our smaller, individual decisions that we make on an almost daily basis? What happens to your personal ethics when you have something to lose? This book does a masterful job of laying a framework to help you answer those questions and hear how others have struggled to come to their own conclusions.

Todd Wilms, Chief Marketing Officer, FoundersPlace.co, and coauthor of Beyond Product

Helpful, grounding, encouraging, and gentle. I needed a new way of looking at my life and my choices. This book helped me be kinder to myself at a really tough junctureand allowed something surprising to unfold.

Shea McGuier, Director of Communications, Telecare Corporation

The Ethical Sellout combines practical advice with relatable storiesdeciding how to both define and choose between your values and needs has never been more compassionately explained.

Stephanie Eberle, Assistant Dean and Director, Stanford BioSci Careers

The Ethical Sellout presents an uncomplicated framework for navigating the complicated choices that confront us in our increasingly complex lives as we struggle to make the compromises necessary for success without surrendering the essence of our beliefs.

Vineet Buch, venture capitalist and former Google executive and entrepreneur

Maintaining Your Integrity in the Age of Compromise

Lily Zheng & Inge Hansen

The Ethical Sellout

Copyright 2019 by Lily Zheng and Inge Hansen

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Ordering information for print editions

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First Edition

Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-8584-2

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-8585-9

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-8586-6

Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-8588-0

2019-1

Book producer and editor: PeopleSpeak

Book design and composition: Beverly Butterfield

Cover designer: Irene Morris

To my younger self, who thought she had to be a perfect activist to be a good one. Im glad you were wrong.

Lily

To my parents, in gratitude for all their love and support.

Inge

W hen we decided to write this book, we had been working in separate but overlapping spheres for several years. Our work was different in many ways: Inge was a university clinician; Lily was a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant. What brought us together were stories.

Lily, as an activist, researcher, and consultant, was inundated with stories of all kinds: that of the grassroots organizer fighting for justice, the entry-level employee working to climb up in the workplace, the startup founder grappling with hiring a diverse team. Lily noticed, however, that other stories, beneath the surface, werent being told. One close friend shared that she wanted to leave the activist community. A research participant nervously described compromising her appearance to avoid discrimination. Some of the people with the strongest identities and most deeply held values seemed also to be struggling most with feelings of fear, apprehension, and self-doubt around the everyday decisions they made. They experienced guilt, shame, and self-blame around their choices yet constantly worked to maintain the impression that they were model members of their communities.

Inge, a clinical psychologist who has worked everywhere from the San Diego LGBT Center to the California prison system and who currently directs student health equity and well-being services at Stanford University, has heard more than her fair share of stories as well in the course of her work. She was struck by the decisions that her clients grappled with the most, which often seemed to be conflicts between who they thought they were supposed to be and who they were becoming. It seemed that over and over, people would come to her office as though seeking permissionor forgivenessfor being themselves. They worried that they were letting down their family or community by seeking their own path, which was confusing in the face of the predominant cultural message: Be yourself.

We have deeply personal reasons for writing this book as well: namely, that weve both had our own experiences of selling out.

Lily sold out when she decided to work for the same institution that, as a student activist, she had protested. She sold out her own belief in the importance of grassroots change when she started her own for-profit business working with large corporations. And she sells out every day as she tries to create a public-facing persona that balances authenticity and rebelliousness with the respectability she needs to work with her clients.