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Seven signs of ethical collapse (2012)
- cbsmith 3y agoUnsurprisingly, there's some gross oversimplification going on here, but this is interesting stuff.
- exac 3y agoHere they are: 1. Pressure to maintain numbers 2. Fear and silence 3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO 4. Weak board of directors 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed 6. Innovation like no other company 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
- hackernewds 3y agoGreat tldr of the article
- stcredzero 3y agoIt seems that many news media companies have these 4 in 2023! - Pressure to maintain numbers - Fear and silence - Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed - Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoMuch more sobering, at least to me: I, personally, arguably have five of them.
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- pstuart 3y agoIncentives are a hell of a drug. My last job was at a company where the CEO had the vision and the personality to lead the company through a necessary transformation (it was in a long-tail business). The individual contributors were smart, experienced, and good people. But between the top and the bottom there was a complete disconnect, as people were driven by incentives that rewarded individuals and teams for things that did not serve the company as a whole. Not an unusual scenario in any large organization, but it was beyond frustrating.
- indigochill 3y agoHow do you get a CEO with vision to structure the incentives towards achieving the vision (presumably starting with the incentives for his direct reports and maybe coaching them to do the same for their reports, and on down the chain)?
- throwawaysleep 3y agoI am not sure you can without the CEO understanding all the ways the incentive can be gamed or hacked. The CEO would need to be as good as the workers at their particular job roles.
- actionfromafar 3y agoIf the workers are in already with the vision, the CEO needs to understand the managers “only”.
- pstuart 3y agoThe CEO I referred to apparently was aware of structural problems and approached them as "I have to let them fail first". This is not entirely unreasonable but painful as hell to stand by and watch.
- stcredzero 3y agoIncentives are a hell of a drug. This is the Homo sapiens version of the Alignment Problem.
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- CrazyStat 3y ago(2012)
- throwawaysleep 3y agoFundamentally ethics are a luxury. I might have some if I ever become rich and financially independent of the rest of society, but until that point I will not have any. And even then, it comes after other needs like comfort and achieving my own goals. I won't sacrifice much of anything for ethics.
- bigbacaloa 3y ago[dead]
- jacquesm 3y agoCampguard an option for very good comp? Or would that be a bridge too far?
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoI suspect you might have a different definition of ethics. I doubt many people would, for instance, murder for comfort or achieving their goals.
- throwawaysleep 3y agoMurder is illegal and has significant negative personal consequences. But lots of things are not illegal and thus can be done with non-social risk.
- withinboredom 3y agoMost unethical behaviors (regardless of being illegal or legal) have significant personal consequences. However, most unethical things are actually also illegal, falling under "fraud", "willful neglect", etc. There's a gray area, usually referred to as "dark patterns" that aren't yet proven to be illegal, but likely are, if the regulators ever had the free time to care. But yeah. Unethical people might find they have a hard time actually getting past a certain point in relationships (business or friendly), though sometimes it's good to have a few shrewd people in your back pocket to call on.
- 3y ago
- spa3thyb 3y ago(2012) > “I hire them just like me: smart, poor, and want to be rich,” she quoted former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski as saying. Some time later... "Ex-Tyco CEO Kozlowski says he stole out of pure greed" ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyco-kozlowski-release-idUSBRE9B417820131205/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyco-kozlowski-release-id... )
- Joker_vD 3y ago"...but my motives were pure!" — "You stole it out of greed." — "Pure greed!"
- Terr_ 3y agoSomehow that makes me think of the memorable (and ambiguously villainous) speech from The Network (1976) [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35DSdw7dHjs&t=1m11s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35DSdw7dHjs&t=1m11s
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- btilly 3y agoI immediately sanity checked this with three examples. SBF fit amusingly well. His fraud had all of these, with Effective Altruism providing an extreme example of how goodness in some areas atones for evil in others. Stanford's president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned after his reputation was found to be based on fraudulent research. Descriptions that I've read from those in his lab showed most of these. Enron is too canonical an example to ignore. Yes, it had all of these.
- hackernewds 3y agoWells Fargo misses most. So does HSBC
- btilly 3y agoI don't know enough about what happened inside of those to evaluate.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoThey're banks, so the assumption is lack of ethics.
- LegibleCrimson 3y agoThey appear to from the outside. Most of the examples of ethical collapse that I'm aware of weren't entirely clear until after the organization collapsed and the dirty laundry went public. A lot of these would either be actively suppressed or they'd only be clear to people who are inside the organization.
- thundergolfer 3y agoOn the one hand, the article and the talk it is about stresses the severity of the moral transgression: "moral meltdowns", "really crossed very bright lines", "ethical collapse". But on the other hand, the implications of the moral failure for the moral status of the company and its employees is pushed far away into the corner: - "These are great companies, great organizations, good people" - "misguided companies" - "good people at great companies" The list that follows is something you can retroactively apply to numerous instances of corporate wrongdoing, but also provides an enormous amount of false positives and a false negatives. Thousands of businesses don't meet these criteria and yet are morally compromised (e.g. Cargill). Thousands of businesses do meet these criteria and yet aren't going to be called out as "ethically collapsed" by the author before they've been outed and widely accepted as failed.
- legitster 3y agoPart of the problem with this sort of analysis is that hindsight is always 20/20. You may think your company has is transparent and has a wonderful process for handling conflicts of interest. Then only when things collapse do people come out of the woodwork and start dishing drama. If they have a fear and suppression program that works, you would never hear about it!
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- shimon 3y agoYes, it's often hard to identify this as an outsider. But people inside the company know, and if you've worked in places that handle conflict in healthy ways and in some that handle it not-so-well, you'll know quite clearly within a few days where your workplace stands.
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- Traubenfuchs 3y agoFeels like half of this advice is directed at people that wouldn‘t profit from it. The reason people higher up are/become less ethical is because that usually is a quality needed to rise.
- stillwithit 3y agoSo economy in the aggregate is in the midst of ethical collapse? You can find numerous examples across institutions and industry that meet all these criteria. 1. Pressure to maintain numbers… line must go up economy. 2. Fear and silence… quiet quitting, workers keep going in while expressing fear in private 3. Young uns and bigger than life CEO… see tech, finance, academia, politics exploitation of naive grads 4. Weak board of directors… voters and workers are subservient to 1% 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked… why do so few have so much reach into all our lives? 6. Innovation like no other… US capitalism is unsurpassed! World cannot do without it!! Resell yesterday with faster chips and flatter design!! … metrics hacks line up!! 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others… we are burning up the planet for the next generation but how about that iPhone 15, dick rockets into space, and those massive F350s!
- segasaturn 3y agoYes, my thoughts were that all of these symptoms have become even more acute and obvious as time has gone on. This article from 2012 was probably only useful for scholarly purposes and high level debates between ethicists, but now even the commoners can see all of these issues glaring so clear and bright that this article is less useful and more the obvious being stated about what is constantly happening around us.
- kortilla 3y ago> 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others… we are burning up the planet for the next generation but how about that iPhone 15, dick rockets into space, and those massive F350s! This is not what that point means. “Goodness” isn’t referring to cool shit. It’s referring to doing good things. Someone buys an F350 but then “offsets it” by donating money to a climate activist charity.
- dustingetz 3y agoThe direction of progress is the direction of increasing accountability good book about that - https://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Financial-Accountability-Rise-Nations/dp/0465031528/ https://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Financial-Accountability-Ri... tldr thesis is that the invention of double entry bookkeeping is the thing that has caused modern prosperity, not capitalism. we can only cooperate to the extent that we can detect cheating. Consider a 1600s merchant – without the ability to detect fraud, how can you give your goods to a shipping company? Capitalism is only possible if you can count your capital! a memorable example was a French king (Louis XV?) who bankrupted the realm because he didn’t know how much money he had.
- Terr_ 3y agoIt makes for an kind of inherent contradiction--or at least tension--inside certain types of laissez faire capitalist thought, between perfect-information versus the autonomy of secrecy. On Monday, capital-C-Capitalism is celebrated as being the most efficient and economist-approved system (i.e. the bestest) when--if--there is somehow perfect price/deal information available to all actors. On Tuesday, no-True-Capitalism is lauded as immune to cartels and collusion, because any actor will quickly undercut the others with secret prices and deals and hidden identities and wash-trading. On Wednesday, Virtuous Capitalism needs no oversight because nasty behavior will be seen and detected by consumers who will vote with their wallets. On Thursday, Property-Respecting Capitalism refuses to infringe on the owners' essential freedom... to construct impenetrable webs of shifting corporate ownership to obfuscate all controlling relationships.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoThis article, and especially point 2 (Fear and silence) is a great rebuttal against the flaw of the Radical Candor/Manipulative Insincerity framework; which considers apathy towards issues in the workplace as tantamount to being manipulative without considering why people resort to this behavior in the first place. It is not easy for an single employee to change deeply embedded negative organizational behaviors, and therefore it is better for the employee to work with the goal of reward maximization (through a focus on total compensation and hitting numbers) and feigning ignorance or not bothering to report issues that cross ethical lines, which may backfire and cause trouble for the employee (constructive dismissal, smear campaigns, lawsuits etc.)
- overvale 3y ago> To front-line employees, the line between right and wrong is very bright. Something happens to people as they climb up through management, she said. The bright line seems to fade. This doesn't seem like a mystery to me. In my experience the more you climb up through management the more you leave the realm of clear-cut choices and enter a world of nasty trade-offs. Do that enough times, and get your head spun around enough by trade-offs you don't know how to navigate but have to deal with immediately, and you'll get a kind of "trade off numbness".
- naasking 3y ago> and get your head spun around enough by trade-offs you don't know how to navigate but have to deal with immediately, and you'll get a kind of "trade off numbness" I wonder if this could explain why corporations grow into slow behemoths, as a kind of subconscious moral cover. Most people think the causal arrow happens one way, ie. corporations grow due to efficiencies or other factors and moral rot is a side-effect, but maybe it's actually the other way around in some cases. Since everyone tries to see themselves as basically good, but they still want to make money and be profitable, they migrate towards structures with extra layers that provide extra plausible deniability and obfuscation of questionable moral decisions.
- bumby 3y agoA Freakonomics episode claims that corporations "grow into slow behemoths" because, by the nature of being successful, you tend to have more programs to maintain. So you spend more time in maintenance mode and outsource your innovation by acquiring scrappy start-ups. It's a risk/reward tradeoff of its own.
- overvale 3y agoThis matches my experience. Complexity is a real problem. I've found this video does a good job outlining how this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp4RCIfX66I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp4RCIfX66I
- csours 3y ago"Our competitor is getting away with it"
- jahewson 3y ago> 4. A Weak Board of Directors > Weak boards tend to have inexperienced members, often ones who are too young to have experienced a complete business cycle, which was often the case with companies in the dot-com boom. > Often they have ethical conflicts of interest as well, in terms of consulting arrangements, related party transactions, … Sound familiar?
- Vegenoid 3y agoIf we're going to list the signs that could apply to OpenAI, let's list them all: 3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO 6. Innovation like no other company 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
- neon_me 3y agoShow me one company not checking at least one of the boxes...
- adverbly 3y agoNot exactly clear-cut to identify... 7 different subjective signals? Sounds too much like astrology where 10/12 different horoscopes would apply to most people anyways. Before subscribing to something like this, I'd want to see hard data around how common each of these signals is in a random sample of companies(possibly even with a breakdown by industry)
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- RadixDLT 3y agosounds like google
- myth_drannon 3y agoThat's 2012. Now we have a TikTok generation. After seeing interviews with Free Palestine protesters and general TikTok crowd, I fear US has no future and it will be an easy pick for China. These people are from prestigious universities but they are so dumb. Very, very dumb. In 20 years they will be working for US government ( because Yale, Harvard). TikTok is a weapon of mass destruction.
- Thoreandan 3y agoThe WayBack Machine's 2018 snapshot <https://web.archive.org/web/20181008124103/https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/business-ethics/resources/seven-signs-of-ethical-collapse/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181008124103/https://www.scu.e...> dates this article to (2007)
- mannanj 3y agoPressure to maintain numbers Fear and silence Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO Weak board of directors Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed Innovation like no other company Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others I was hoping for something, but sadly feel these all apply to our majority government in many world countries today, don't they?
- nothrowaways 3y ago1. Pressure to maintain numbers 2. Fear and silence 3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO 4. Weak board of directors 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed 6. Innovation like no other company 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
- drones 3y agoSeven signs of ethical collapse: 1. Pressure to maintain numbers 2. Fear and silence 3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO 4. Weak board of directors 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed 6. Innovation like no other company 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others Umberto Eco's 14 signs of fascism: 1. The cult of tradition. 2. The rejection of modernism. 3. The cult of action for action's sake. 4. Disagreement is treason. 5. Fear of difference. 6. Appeal to social frustration. 7. The obsession with a plot. 8. The humiliation by the wealth and force of their enemies. 9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. 10. Contempt for the weak. 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. 12. Machismo and weaponry. 13. Selective populism. 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Each list contains symptoms of some degenerating organisation. However, I can easily find counterexamples of successful organisations which demonstrate one or more of these qualities. In fact, these organisations may be successful because they exhibit one or more of these qualities. This way of understanding the world is entirely juvenile and unfit as an evaluative framework.
- malfist 3y agoUnethical and successful are not mutually exclusive. Nor is fascism and success.
- ordu 3y agoI cannot agree. It is not a juvenile way of understanding, it is the only sensible way of understanding. Or rather it is not a way of understanding, it is one of the tools that can speed up understanding. Social systems are very complex, you cannot write an algorithm of evaluation in terms of "measure this and that, then use this formula". It never works. You need to understand how the system works and it takes some research. To do the research these 7 signs can be very helpful at first. They allow you to form you hypotheses fast on a data that not completely irrelevant. Just one more thing: these 7 signs are not just a measure procedure giving you one number, each one is a facet of an organisation that should be studied. To be sure you'd better find some another evaluation framework, and study facets of an organization that it deems to be the most important. It is like psychological tests: they do not diagnose the problems, but they allow to see a client from different perspectives. Tests are relatively cheap and they give you some threads to unravel. > I can easily find counterexamples of successful organisations which demonstrate one or more of these qualities 1. No one said that these signs are signs of an unsuccessful organisations. You can be completely unethical and pretty successful at the same time. To my mind, the question does ethics correlate with a success or not is an ideological one. Theoretically speaking you can study it in a relatively objective way, but ideologies will win at the end. Either your indoctrination will take the upper hand, or indoctrination of others will force you to argue in a favor of "our sin will be punished inevitable" or something like. It is hard to find thinkers who are immune to that, there is a lot of wishful thinking goes on. 2. 1-2 signs is not a verdict, but an invitation to look deeper at the matters. Likewise 0 signs is not a verdict but very suspicious situation: how so? I will be very surprised if I find no these signs in any mildly successful organisation.