It seems a great many people believe that everyone else, and particularly, everyone in management, is unethical; the system is corrupt, all management is corrup

It seems a great many people believe that everyone else, and particularly, everyone in management, is unethical; the system is corrupt, all management is corrupt, and the only way to advance is to sacrifice one's values. I used to believe this too. To the ethical people out there, I'd like to say that there is a battle and we haven't lost yet. It sure looks that way, given the behavior of the government, large corporations, even NGOs. But its a battle. And the first front in the battle is mindshare. If ethical people believe that everything is corrupt and hopeless, then the unethical people have won. Consider this: the rogue employee at OpenTable could genuinely be a rogue employee. They might even be a nominal ethical employee who perceived behavior around them as unethical, or who believed that the only way to success given their performance targets was to behave unethically. They may have believed that the only explanation for the performance targets were that OpenTable wanted them to act unethically, when in fact they were just impossible targets set by an aggressive, but ethical manager. I'm sorry to say that ethical behavior is something we have to fight for continuously. We don't get to create a constitution a few hundred years ago and call it done. But it doesn't help if we declare, as I used to, that the government has been "rooted", and the US is just an unethical cesspit now. Get involved. Demand ethical behavior. Call out moral hazards. Talk about ethics.