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According to Mike Daisey in his The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, he saw first-hand the appalling conditions in which employees work at Foxconn, Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partner.

Also according to Mike Daisey, making stuff up and presenting it as fact is just fine when you’re presenting a “larger truth.” Or so he said when The American Life, which had broadcast The Agony in the first place on the understanding that it was factually accurate, revealed that, after further investigation, it wasn’t.

I’m not certain of much, but I’m certain of this: If you have to make stuff up to support your “truth,” you’re telling neither the truth nor a truth. Truth be told, none of us has access to the truth. The best any of us can achieve is some confidence that the evidence on which we base our opinions is reliable, the logic we’ve used is sound, and we’re honest in how we explain it.

And so, KJR hereby announces a moratorium on the word “truth” and its derivatives, because whoever lays claim to it is either deceiving themselves or lying to someone else.

Meanwhile, back in not-yet-offshored America, the latest trend in recruiting is requiring job applicants to provide their Facebook password. Or so the story goes.

Unlike Michael Daisey, the AP’s Manuel Valdes and Shannon McFarland reported actual events as they happened — a few factually accurate (or, at least, undisputed) anecdotes. But as someone once said, the plural of anecdote is not data. A few instances is hardly the same thing as a trend.

Which isn’t to say there’s no such trend. It’s to say that we have no more knowledge of whether this is a trend after reading the AP story than we did before reading it, just as was the case with Daisey.

Different reasons, same result.

In the case of Apple and Foxconn, thanks to an investigation by the Fair Labor Association (which despite the name is an industry-funded, not union-funded organization) it appears that Daisey notwithstanding, working conditions at Foxconn, while far from horrific, often violated even China’s lax standards.

Which brings us to a question that’s of personal interest to you.

You don’t have to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation to be responsible for an offshore outsourcing contract. It’s easy to be self-righteous about Apple either (pick one) failing to properly audit its manufacturing partner or knowingly involving itself with a company that treats employees poorly.

It’s a lot harder to avoid being guilty of the exact same thing when the subject is your offshore outsourcer.

There’s a school of thought that says this isn’t your problem anyway. Your job is to contract for the best possible service at the best possible price. The company you’re contracting with is located in another country. It has different laws, different enforcement of the law, a different culture, and different expectations of what a work environment should be.

That makes it all Someone Else’s Problem, doesn’t it?

Legally, it probably does. Ethically? Probably not.

The reductio ad absurdum argument is all you need: Were you to learn that an offshore outsourcer used slaves rather than employees, chaining them to their desks and whipping them if they didn’t write your code while starving them to death because the supply of slave programmers is ample but food is expensive … legally, because that’s how it is in their country … were you to learn this, I sure hope you’d choose a different offshoring partner, even if it cost you more to do so.

If you agree, you agree you have some ethical responsibilities for setting minimum standards for workplace conditions. Now that this is settled, the question that remains is what they should be.

That’s a question that’s easier to ask than to answer. Applying U.S. standards to countries with lower standards of living and different expectations of the workplace truly doesn’t make sense. On the other hand, accepting whatever level of misery is the norm there as your standard is probably the wrong answer, too.

What’s probably the right answer is to spend some time there, talking with the people who do your work, to gain some sense of what they would find comfortable … not luxurious, not barely tolerable, but comfortable. You’re looking for, not physical equivalence to U.S. working conditions, but emotional equivalence.

That’s a complicated proposition. I’d love to offer a simple, clear solution instead, but as usual the world is too complicated for a simple solution to work.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Participating in team sports is supposed to teach children valuable lessons about life … for example, that losing isn’t the end of the world, only the end of the game. That opponents aren’t enemies is another one.

It appears the New Orleans Saints didn’t get the email. Its players established a bounty system (I’d say “allegedly” except that nobody seems to be denying that it happened), funding a pool that paid players to injure targeted opponents.

Call it managing for results. Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams administered the program. Coach Sean Payton and general manager Mickey Loomis knew of it and did nothing to stop it. Why would they? It helped win games.

Or, call it criminal behavior that won’t be prosecuted: While paying someone to deliberately injure someone else is inarguably a felony, the experts expect prosecutors to defer to the NFL’s jurisdiction.

Imagine you’re NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. It’s your jurisdiction. What’s your first question?

It’s “who did what?” Who, that is, is to blame for this mess. When, as a leader and manager, you learn your organization has engaged in criminal activities, or activities you’ve defined as unacceptable through a policy manual, values statement, or other equivalent vehicle, you need to know whodunit. And you need to deal with them appropriately to make sure they don’t engage your organization in illegal or unethical activities again.

For criminal or unethical behavior, assigning blame … accurately … is essential.

When something else goes wrong, though, your first question should be Goodell’s second question: What characteristic of our organization led to the bad thing happening?

Goodell has ascribed it to culture, but I wonder, because when you count the total value of winning playoff games … including endorsements … there’s serious money at stake.

Regardless, this, and not who’s to blame, should be your first question when something goes wrong because when those in leadership roles ask who’s at fault, they’re making both a logical error and a tactical mistake.

The tactical error: Establishing a game of Whac-A-Mole, where the smart employees keep their heads down, and those who don’t … those who poke their heads out to help fix the situation … end up receiving blows to their noggins.

The logical error is that they’re assuming the conclusion. There are plenty of ways something can go wrong. Those who ask whose fault it is blind themselves to other explanations while fostering a culture of blame.

Last week’s column pointed out the enormous costs of this culture … where the habit is to ask who’s at fault instead of what when wrong. To change it, as is the case with most other changes in culture, what’s needed is a change in leader behavior.

In this case, the solution is literally formulaic: Success = aI + bE + cL. As is usual, a, b, and c are weighting factors. I, E, and L stand for idea, execution, and luck. Success comes from an idea that can work, strong execution, and good luck (or avoiding bad luck) too.

To get rid of a culture of blame, start with the formula whenever something goes wrong. Make it everyone’s habit.

If the idea wasn’t sound, ask whether there was a reasonable way to have discovered this before investing in it. The answer isn’t always yes. Presumably, Apple applied the same evaluation process to both the iPad and Apple TV. Whatever might have prevented Apple TV probably would have stopped development of the iPad, too. Bad trade-off.

If the problem was in execution, there is a possibility that someone screwed up, and if so, that whoever it was didn’t just make a mistake but is a chronic screw-up. It’s possible.

It’s more likely the problem lies in the organization’s systems, processes, or culture. Improving these would pay big dividends.

Even if the source of the problem was a bad employee, termination won’t fix the root cause. Something about the organization’s management practices left a chronic screw-up in place, after all. Fixing this problem would pay even bigger dividends than fixing processes and systems, and that’s assuming the screw-up isn’t screwing up because of poor leadership rather than incompetence or character flaws.

Then there’s bad luck. If that’s what happened, you need better risk management.

It might be worse, though — it might be an even more insidious problem, even harder to fix than a culture of blame: That the whole plan depended on good luck.

Regrettably, we’ll have to wait until next week to handle that little topic.

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