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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

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: Career Management|Last Updated:

What, I’m sure you’ve been wondering, does successful spycraft have to do with the projects your organization undertakes?

Wonder no more. I’ve tracked down the answer, courtesy of Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story (2014), whose author, Jack Devine, ran some of the CIA’s biggest, most complex, and highest-profile covert operations (he was the Phillip Seymour Hoffman character’s successor in “Charlie Wilson’s war” – the U.S. support for the mujahedeen’s resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

If you decide to read it you either will or won’t be put off by the author’s occasionally self-congratulatory tone, and might or might not be convinced CIA covert operations are as good an idea as he thinks they are. KJR doesn’t discuss foreign policy matters unless they’re directly related to information technology, and even then …

Whether you think covert operations are a good idea has nothing to do with they take. Turns out, a lot of it is (or should be) Project Management 101. It also turns out that whatever else Jack Devine is, he’s KJR’s kind of project manager: His list isn’t about what’s needed for covert ops to succeed. It’s a list of the factors without which covert operations (and your projects) are bound to fail:

  • Viable partners in place: In the world of covert ops this means there has to be a significant faction within a host nation that shares our goals and objectives and is willing to fight for them. In your world this means someone who matters in the affected business areas has to want it deeply enough to stick his or her neck out from time to time to help the project succeed.
  • Real-time, accurate information: In the world of spycraft this means information from foreign agents, not just technologically gathered intelligence. In your world this means you need a personal network that lets you know what the buzz is about your project.
  • Adequate resources: You might recall that nearly every Y2K remediation project succeeded. You also might recall that companies opened their checkbooks to support them. You also might recall business leaders who drew exactly the wrong conclusion … too many idiotically decided their success meant there never had been any risk. The right conclusion: While “throwing money at a project” doesn’t generally help, starving a project is usually much worse.
  • Bipartisan political support: In business, bipartisanship isn’t good enough, because few businesses are limited to just two competing factions. So from your perspective let’s call it multi-partisanship. Not everyone has to support a project for it to succeed, but enough have to that the political clout is on the project manager’s side.
  • A direct threat to U.S security: In covert operations, this means the adversary against which the covert operation is targeted must present a clear and present danger — covert operations aren’t something to undertake lightly. Projects in your world ought to have some reasonably direct connection to threats and opportunities in the marketplace.
  • Proportionality: Even the cleanest covert operation can cause “collateral damage” (the intelligence community’s clinical euphemism for “innocent bystanders can get hurt or killed”). In your world the situation is less extreme but still real: The expected value of a project’s outcomes must outweigh, not only its direct costs but also the intangible costs associated with the disruption it causes.
  • A reasonable prospect for success: For a covert operation, policy makers must have clear objectives and a fact-based assessment demonstrating that the operation is feasible. For one of your projects it’s usually a good idea to either determine that someone else has done something similar and succeeded at it, or to complete a so-called but usually mis-named “proof of concept.”

Devine makes the point that making sure these factors are in place is the responsibility of policy makers, not the CIA. KJR makes the point that business policy makers have a parallel responsibility, not the CIO.

Except that this is where the parallel breaks down. When we’re talking about the CIA and covert operations, even success can have grave consequences, so strong top-down controls are essential.

Keep in mind that instituting controls means establishing a system in which the default answer to any suggestion is “No.” This is rarely desirable. At best, it’s less undesirable than the alternatives.

Most businesses want, or should want to encourage innovation and initiative, something controls stifle through the EHL effect (epiphany half life) — the time needed for the enthusiasm for a new idea to be cut in half.

So before you subject proposed projects to too much vetting, ask yourself whether the loss of innovation and initiative is worth it.

See proportionality, above.

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