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When business writers use sports metaphors it’s usually to illustrate the value of such staples as teamwork, persistence, and steroids.

Vikings star running back Adrian Peterson’s indictment for child abuse doesn’t really lend itself to metaphor. Direct, useful guidance? That’s a different matter.

Some facets of the situation are directly relevant to business leaders no matter what their specific role. Here are some that occur to me … and I promise to do my best to avoid empty moralizing, as plenty of other commentators have already filled that niche:

  • The past explains. It doesn’t justify. Peterson’s apologists, and I include Peterson himself in this category, point out that his father raised him the same way.

So what?

If you believe in the concept of progress, a logical consequence is that no matter what the subject, the world has learned more about it since your parents did their learning.

  • Never use yourself as a positive example. Sean Hannity shows why (skip to 1:45). In explaining that he was raised the same way and that he came out okay, he appears to be anything but okay. Seriously disturbed seems to be a better description.

Even if he’d maintained his composure, it wouldn’t matter, because neither Sean Hannity, nor you, nor I are qualified to evaluate our own wonderfulness. That’s why we provide references instead of explaining to a prospective employer, “Trust me — I’ll make a marvelous executive.”

And besides, saying “I was raised this way and I came out fine” is semantically equivalent to a combat veteran who isn’t suffering from PTSD claiming his outcome as evidence that combat doesn’t cause PTSD.

  • Don’t give credit for moral luck. After Peterson’s indictment, Nike, Target and Wheaties severed their ties to him. A principled stand? Well, it wasn’t an unprincipled stand, but that’s different. It isn’t principle unless it hurts, and what would have hurt these companies would have been continuing to associate themselves with him.

Radisson severed its sponsorship of the Vikings for their handling of the situation — arguably a more difficult call, but not by much. Some people will approve, some will disapprove, many won’t care, and Radisson’s marketing has plenty of other places to spend its budget. Not enough pain to be principle.

  • Due process and all that. The Vikings first public response to this mess was that Peterson has a right to due process, and it would have been improper to punish him before he was found guilty in a court of law.

There’s something to be said for this point, even though as a society we’ve already rejected it in its entirety.

Rejected it? Yup. Many businesses avoid hiring ex-convicts, even though they’ve theoretically paid their debt to society. School districts … and private schools as well … discharge teachers who violate their codes of conduct, even when their code of conduct is more restrictive than what’s legally required of a citizen.

Military officers, along with quite a few CEOs who aren’t named Larry Ellison have been discharged for having affairs with subordinates.

No court of law was required in these cases. “Due process” is understood to include internal HR-led investigations. This is the flaw in the Vikings’ argument: Zygi Wilf and company had the option of launching an internal investigation so as to give Peterson the benefit of due process.

  • Who’s running the show? Unlike Nike, Target and General Mills, Zygi Wilf was emphatically not the beneficiary of moral luck. I say Zygi Wilf because the Minnesota Vikings is a privately held corporation which he owns. As such, the team’s choices were expressions of his personal principles — it’s his show.

Unlike the Vikings, Nike, Target and General Mills, which owns the Wheaties brand are publicly held corporations.

That means everyone in management, up to and including the CEO, aren’t acting as or for themselves. In an important sense they aren’t running the show, merely acting as agents for the companies that employ them. Their operative moral metric is whether they’re acting in their employers’ best interests. Often, operating within the law is included in this framework.

One might argue that if General Mills was a “natural person” and really wanted to “do the right thing” — to make a principled rather than economic decision — it might replace Peterson with Kent Brantly or Nancy Writebol on its Wheaties boxes.

In case you don’t recognize their names, they’re the first two WHO doctors to contract Ebola while working in West Africa.

Associate Wheaties with real heroes, that is, not just sports heroes.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Get the pitchforks.

We haven’t progressed much since Salem. When something goes wrong, most of us waste little time deciding who’s at fault so we can “hold them accountable.” And nowhere is this better-developed than the cable-news commentariat, where, no matter what bad news is being discussed, someone complains that nobody lost their job or went to jail.

The go-to-jail branch is beyond KJR’s purview. Besides, when a corporation commits a felony it can’t be put in jail, nor is it often clear that some individual within the company committed the felony, let alone which one.

Moving on to the importance of firing someone …

When something goes wrong, whether it’s an offshore oil rig blowing up, veterans waiting too long for medical care, or falsified metrics about how long veterans are waiting for medical care, asking who’s at fault means making two false assumptions.

The first is that firing someone for being the root cause will put everyone else on notice that failure has consequences … that the threat of punishment will deter failure.

But it won’t, for a bunch of reasons, like:

  • Very few people come to work every day planning to find yet another way to screw things up, so there’s nothing to deter in the first place.
  • The person who gets punished is only rarely the source of the problem. More likely, they’re just a scapegoat who lacked the political savvy to keep his or her head down to let some other poor sap take the fall.

 All that will be deterred is visibility. Mostly, employees will learn to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

  • The person doing the firing is probably the person who hired the person they’re firing, which means the terminator screwed up worse than the terminee, and will probably screw up the same way again when replacing the dear departed. What is it that will be deterred, exactly?

So the value of deterrence is the first false assumption. The second is that the root cause of the problem was that someone was at fault in the first place.

You could, I suppose, make the case that no matter what goes wrong, someone was in a position to prevent it and failed to do so. When, for example, the asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago or so, just before the last few dinosaurs expired, one probably looked at his fellow reptiles and said, “It’s those danged T-Rexes! If they’d only invented rockets and Bruce Willis we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

But really, it’s much more useful to ask what went wrong. When you do you’ll learn what you need to change to make sure the same thing doesn’t go wrong over and over again.

Sometimes, what went wrong was that someone was sitting in the wrong chair — that the person responsible for whatever it was had the wrong attitude, aptitudes, skills, and knowledge to make things work the way they’re supposed to.

If this describes your situation, you should move that person to a different chair — one in which they’re more likely to be successful. If you don’t have any chairs like that, you might have to terminate the employee, who will then, one hopes, find the right chair in a different organization.

You do need the right people in the right chairs. But this isn’t holding anyone accountable. It’s effective staffing — a very different matter. And oh, by the way, managers who find themselves having to do this frequently might ask themselves what they’re doing wrong when it comes to hiring people.

Which is why I give President Obama and General Shinseki credit. There was no mention of holding anyone accountable and no suggestion that Shinseki was being punished. Both agreed the VA needs new, distraction-free leadership. The president complimented Shinseki for his decades of service, as he should have.

General Shinseki has, in his career, proven himself to be immensely capable in a variety of roles. At the VA he demonstrated that turning around a giant bloated bureaucracy isn’t one of them.

And that’s what the VA needs right now. We can hope that when Obama proposes and the Senate confirms Shinseki’s replacement, this is what everyone will be focused on.

Probably, it won’t, because when it comes to public officials, just about everyone, from politicians to the talking heads to, for that matter, the voting public cares more about policy than competence.

What they ignore is that without competence, the chance of following the best policy is unlikely, while with it the chance of implementing policy is greatly enhanced.

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