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Dear Bob,

I’m an IT manager in my early ’50s. I’m employed by a small-to-midsize company, responsible for a small-to-midsize department. My team is outstanding, I get along with my manager pretty well, and for that matter I get along with most of the execs and managers here.

The company is well-regarded in its space and we’ve made some interesting moves recently that are helping us grow. The company culture is congenial, and while jobs here aren’t generally 40-hours-and-home, the style certainly isn’t bop-’til-you-drop, either.

I earn neither top dollar nor bottom, and between us, my wife and I make more than we spend … quite a bit more … without ever thinking we’re doing without anything.

I need your advice.

I took a call from a recruiter the other day. Bigger company, bigger IT department, bigger challenges, more money. My question: Am I being disloyal and unethical for even talking to them? Completely nuts?

– Restless

Dear Restless …

Let’s start with your ingratitude, disloyalty, and lack of moral fiber.

An analogy: You’re married to a woman you like and who treats you well. You have a nice home, live in a nice community and all that.

You’re minding your own business at lunch one day when a beautiful woman approaches you and says, in a low, husky voice, “I’d like to get to know you better.” Would talking to her be disloyal or immoral?

The two situations have an interesting number of parallels, assuming, that is, you consider zero to be an interesting number.

There’s a reason they’re called marriage “vows.” You and your wife took on personal obligations to each other. While it’s sometimes called a “marriage contract,” unlike legal contracts, marriage contracts have emotional content.

I hope.

So except for those adventurous folks whose marriage vows are, shall we say, more expansive than the norm, exploring new opportunities constitutes an act of betrayal. By my standards, at least, that’s immoral.

Your relationship with your employer has, in contrast, no emotional context at all. It can’t, because your employer isn’t a person (sorry, isn’t a “natural person”). Corporations lack the neural and hormonal wiring for emotions. Your relationship with your employer is in the realm of legal contracts and quid pro quos, not emotional commitments.

Put simply, there’s no such thing as cheating on your employer, at least not in the same sense as cheating on one’s spouse. Your obligation is to trade an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Business practice over the past thirty years or more has made this explicit: Employers have no obligation to be loyal to employees.

Quite the opposite: As SCOTUS makes corporations more “human,” corporations increasingly turn employees into resources and “human capital.”

So exploring other opportunities is completely ethical according to the standards of behavior established by the business community.

Whether it’s a good idea for you, right now, is a different matter, and an uninvolved third party can provide only limited guidance.

I have no answers for you. Just a few questions, whose answers might provide at least some guidance:

  • Do you need the additional money? I can answer that one. No, you don’t, and if you take a new job just to chase the money you’ll regret it. I’d bet as much as a quarter on this.
  • Is what you really need a new challenge? It might be. Especially if you lead a terrific organization there might not be very much for you to do; at least, not much that’s particularly important.

If that’s the case, talk to your manager and ask for a bigger challenge — some project beyond your day job you can sink your teeth into.

  • Are you simply suffering from wanderlust — a desire to see what’s over the horizon, just because you haven’t been there before?

There’s nothing wrong with that. In the end, when the subject is what you want to do with your life, all the logic in the world has only purpose, and that’s to figure out what will give you the most personal satisfaction. If this is the case, while pursuing the opportunity is risky and more likely to leave you worse off than you are now, failing to pursue the opportunity will result in regret.

There are worse emotions to feel than regret. I’m not sure what they are, though.

Which brings us to your last question — whether you’re nuts. The answer: beats me. If you’re concerned, get a shrink to administer the Minnesota Multiphasic.

All I know is, this isn’t a symptom.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

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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