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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Premise 1:Businesses aren’t moral agents.

This isn’t up for debate. The Business Roundtable, the official voice of American industry, made this clear in 1997: Businesses exist solely to maximize shareholder value. Fiduciary responsibilities? Yes. Legal obligations? Sure. But moral? Since most business success comes at the expense of competitors, they can’t be.

Premise 2: Businesses have no patriotic duty. Don’t be aghast. It’s all about shareholder value, remember? If moving manufacturing to Kuala Lumpur helps, fine and dandy. If opening a post office box in Bermuda to avoid paying taxes increases profits, wonderful. A business isn’t beholden to any particular nation. (Best exposition on this subject: Arthur Jensen’s speech to Howard Beale in Network. Rent it and you’ll find that Paddy Chayefski brilliant satire has been transformed into the business community’s manifesto.)

Premise 3: Patriotism and morality have no connection. Unless you think Americans are intrinsically more deserving than other people, or that any action, if performed by the United States of America, is automatically good, it’s inescapable that patriotism has all the moral content of being a Chicago Cubs fan. At best, patriotism is about self-interest — not a bad thing, but not a moral issue.

We’re ready: Is moving work offshore immoral? No.

You’re acting as the agent of your employer, an amoral (not immoral) entity. You’re increasing shareholder value, a goal with no intrinsic moral content. And for every human being you lay off, another gets a job. Offshoring is morally neutral.

You are, perhaps, being unpatriotic: Creating unemployment here by transferring jobs elsewhere isn’t to this country’s benefit. Even that formula is simplistic, though: If competitors reduce their costs by going offshore and you don’t, all you’re doing is contributing to your company’s failure — in the long run you save no jobs at all. What choice do you really have?

Your choice starts with your methodologies. Some lend themselves to offshoring. Others, such as “adaptive methodologies,” are better suited to up-close-and-personal on-shore staffing … and hold the promise of increasing the productivity of your developers and integrators enough to compensate for offshore rates.

Adaptive methodologies don’t fit all situations. Neither, for that matter, do the methodologies required for successful offshoring, nor anything else for that matter. Adaptive methodologies, offshoring, the Rational Unified Process, structured analysis, and all the other techniques available to you are just tools in your toolkit. Your responsibility isn’t to offshore, onshore, or anything else.

It’s to use the best tool for each job.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

My LDLs, I recently learned, are high enough to experience the Oort cloud up close and personal. Which is why I looked at the nutritional information printed on a bag of fudge-covered Oreos. The news was wonderful — only 0.5 grams of saturated fat per serving. Wow! Then I looked at the serving size. One cookie. Who are they trying to kid? Everyone knows the standard serving size for Oreos is a bag.

Which demonstrates an important marketing principle: With a little ingenuity you can lie by telling the truth. And so long as you can defend your statements in court you’re in the clear. In marketing, this kind of deception is considered ethical. You have to tell the truth, but after that, caveat emptor.

Managers face different ethical conundrums, and CTOs sometimes have a hard time accepting the contextual nature of executive ethics. Take, for example, the widely accepted principle that “lying is bad.”

Imagine this scenario: Your company decides on a round of layoffs. You disagree. Your options:

1. Resign in protest. But that results in someone less qualified, and likely with fewer scruples in charge of the organization you were too principled to continue leading.

2. Implement the decision but tell everyone you disagree with it. In addition to being unprofessional, that behavior is divisive to the company and damages morale and motivation.

3. Implement the decision and tell everyone you support it, even though you don’t. But then, of course, you aren’t being truthful.

4. Implement the decision and refuse to say whether you agree with it. That’ll keep ’em guessing.

5. Or, implement the decision and tell everyone you aren’t qualified to critique it because the people who made the decision have access to more information than you. Except that as a member of the inner circle, you were part of the decision process. It simply didn’t go your way. You’re lying again, and being a weasel besides.

What’s the right answer? There is no right answer that fits every circumstance, and no answer will leave your sensibilities untrammeled. Worse, every time you have to make a decision like this, the line separating acceptable and unacceptable behavior becomes more blurred and gray. But that isn’t the problem — the line, after all, really is gray and blurry.

No, the problem is inversion of purpose. When you can stomach anything, it’s easy to lose sight of why you wanted to be in the executive suite in the first place.

It’s when your goal becomes just being there that you’re in trouble.

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