One of my favorite cartoon characters, Charlie Brown, was practicing his archery skills one day. He would pull the string as far back as he could, then let the arrow fly toward a fence. Then he would run over to the fence and with a piece of chalk, draw a target around the arrows stuck in the fence.
As usual, Lucy showed up, saw what he was doing, and became hysterical. “That’s no way to practice,” she shouted. “You’re supposed to draw the target and then shoot at it.”
An unrepentant Brown dismissed the matter: “If you do it my way, you never miss!”
Even Charlie Brown can fall victim to situational ethics. We can laugh at him because he’s just a little cartoon kid. But there’s a disturbing trend in American business that isn’t at all funny: It’s OK if you don’t get caught.
As the Enron trial drags on, we should be aware that behaviors, such as cheating, are not confined to big business. The Feb. 6 issue of Business Week magazine reported the following findings by the Center for Academic Integrity, a think tank affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics:
•In a survey of nearly 50,000 students at 69 schools, 26 percent of the business majors admitted to serious cheating on exams. On written assignments, 54 percent admitted they cheated. This includes plagiarism and poaching a friend’s homework.
•Journalism majors were equally dishonest: 27 percent admitted they cheated on exams.
•The most honest group was students in the sciences, where 19 percent reported cheating on tests.
Donald McCabe, a management professor at Rutgers Business School who conducted the surveys, says cheating has increased since he began doing such surveys 15 years ago. He adds that a “disturbing” number of students used recent corporate and political scandals to justify their dishonest behavior.
This behavior was evident when a business school class was being addressed by a self-made millionaire who began and ended his speech with this declaration: “All the success I’ve had in life has been due to one quality: pluck, pluck, pluck.”
Right after the ceremonies were concluded, an ambitious young MBA from the graduating class cornered the millionaire speaker and said unashamedly, “That was a wonderful speech, sir, but could you tell me just how, where and whom do we pluck?”
Whoa – the graduate mistook the noun for the verb! Pluck is a good thing, something that you can’t necessarily teach, but can develop. Too bad the graduate was looking for the “easy” way out.
A little tongue in cheek, but precisely what kind of message is the business community sending to our youth – or for that matter, to anyone and everyone? Why is it so hard to do the right thing?
Many think we put too much pressure on young people to do well … to achieve certain levels. It starts in elementary school, with the pressure to get into the “right” prep school, the most desirable college, the prestigious graduate program, the blue-chip firm.
The competition is fierce and frequently brutal. Is it any wonder that the temptation to find an easy way out is so great?
When corporate scandals erupt and occupy the front pages for days on end, people tend to mistrust all of corporate America. That’s not fair either, but something of a natural reaction. After all, can anyone really make all that money honestly? We know that answer is yes, but many are still skeptical.
Is this a recent development? Not exactly. Nearly 100 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt addressed the issue: “We demand that big business give people a square deal; in return, we must insist that when anyone engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right, he shall himself be given a square deal.”
Mackay’s Moral: Live – and work – like your mother is watching.
And a final, but important note: In a column, I wrote in January I quoted some passages from the poem titled “The Dash.” I found that excerpt online on a subscription service marked anonymous. I now know that the author is Linda Ellis, and the poem is protected by copyright. I tell you this because it is important to acknowledge, whenever possible, the rightful author or creator of anything you may use in conveying ideas or points you may be using in your own work.
Harvey Mackay is author of the New York Times best seller “Pushing the Envelope.” He can be reached through his Web site, www.mackay.com; or at Mackay Envelope Corp., 2100 Elm St., Minneapolis, MN 55414.
