 |
||
 |
 |
 |
|
||
|
|
|
The Conference Board Review® Article
Questioning Authority
Clinton Korver reveals the dark truth about your white lies.
When was the last time you were dishonest? If you're like most people, you don't have to think too far back. Of course, you likely had a "good" reason for your transgression, but was it ethical? Probably not, says Clinton Korver, founder and CEO of DecisionStreet, an online consultancy. In Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life (Harvard Business Press), written with Stanford University professor Ronald Howard, Korver explains why your ethical lapses compound to distort your thinking, sully your reputation, ruin your relationships . . . and, before you know it, you're a Nazi executing innocent Jews. OK, mass murder is a stretch, but the truth according to Korver is that lying, killing, and everything in between all result from similar faulty logic. Korver, 41, spoke from his office in Mountain View, Calif. — Vadim Liberman
Are most people ethical?Most of us are 98 percent ethical. On any given day, there are probably a thousand opportunities to be ethical, but most people will engage in at least a few ethical transgressions — maybe five or ten deceptions or lies a day.
According to a poll you cite, 97 percent of respondents said they consider themselves trustworthy — but only 75 percent say the same about those they work with or live near.It's because people like to rationalize their actions. When you make a small transgression, you rationalize it by saying that you had a good reason, but you're not so charitable when it comes to judging others. Also, when you see others lie, you begin to speculate about how often they do that. So you can be trustworthy one thousand times, but if you're untrustworthy once, your credibility is gone.
Still, your 98 percent estimate seems good enough for me.Well, the tragedy of being almost ethical is that when we engage in transgressions like white lies, it builds in us habits of faulty thinking that can lure us into wrongs we never imagined.
Like eventually killing people?Well, maybe not that extreme.
Then why constantly reference Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in a book titled Ethics for the Real World?Because when you open yourself up to ethical transgressions, there is no endpoint. What's most remarkable about Nazi Germany is that a lot of the atrocities were committed not by thugs but by the best and brightest of society — engineers, lawyers, doctors, managers. The thinking errors and rationalizations that led them into problems are no different than our thinking errors of today. They rationalized their behaviors just as you or I would when telling a white lie.
Comments? Write a letter to the editor.
Return to the May/June 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
Publications