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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

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: Leadership|Last Updated:

Back in the 1980s, MacGyver was the guy who could build a weapons-grade laser out of duct tape, wire ripped out of a wall, a burnt-out light bulb, and ingenuity.

He was a pop culture anomaly … a hero, one of whose defining characteristic was that he was smart. Not smart in the I’ll-show-those-so-called-experts-a-thing-or-three sense, but in the knows-a-lot-of-science-and-engineering sense.

His other two defining characteristics were more mainstream. He had (of course!) little use for authority. And, there was the duct-tape factor.

MacGyver was to improvisation as Google now is to search: A name turned verb. In some entrepreneurships, those who MacGyver are stars. In others, those in which only the entrepreneur is allowed to … what’s the word? … think, they last maybe a minute and a half.

And in companies that have grown to a size and level of complexity where management matters, MacGyvering just isn’t how we do things around here, even though company leaders often agonize over their organization’s inability to innovate.

But aren’t these really the same thing?

Short answer: No, they’re not.

Long answer: Improvised solutions leave a lot out, they’ll miss a lot, and they’re flimsy. They’re done when they’re good enough to handle what’s going on right now, not when they’re a perfect fit and durable enough to last.

They’re quick, cheap, and disposable.

Compare that with innovation — both the relatively easy innovation that creates new products, and the harder kind that’s needed to improve how an organization does its work.

(If you disagree that internal improvement is the greater challenge: When you innovate how work gets done, you aren’t finished when you’ve built the tangible work product. Your job isn’t done until you’ve overcome the various organizational barriers that so often prevent even the best process and practice improvements from being put into productive use.)

Unlike improvisation, innovation has to be thorough as well as new and different, because when you’re changing how a department does its work, quick, cheap and disposable isn’t acceptable.

In the world of software development, we have lots of experience with improvisation. We call it prototyping. Like any other improvised solution, a software prototype only has to be good enough to be helpful getting actual work done right now. More important, unless you’re dealing with a temporary situation, prototypes should be useful for understanding what the “real” solution should look like, once you’re ready to build it.

We also have a lot of experience with innovation. That’s what we do when we design and build production applications, whether we use old-fashioned waterfall methodologies or one of the increasingly popular Agile alternatives.

Because while Agile development is often confused with prototyping, it’s fundamentally different. It’s just as much about building strong, durable, well-engineered, long-lasting solutions as waterfall, even if Agile builds them incrementally or “spirally” rather than from static, predefined specifications.

So just as IT can adopt Agile without also embracing prototyping, there’s no inconsistency between encouraging innovation and discouraging improvisation elsewhere, either.

At least, there’s no inconsistency from the perspective of how an organization’s leaders want change to happen.

Culturally, inviting innovation while excluding improvisation is a dicier proposition. Because while they aren’t identical — innovation requires more discipline, while improvisation calls for a greater sense of urgency — they share something vital — that “this is how we do things around here” is a good reason to do something different.

So while it’s easy to encourage improvisation without being overly concerned about innovation … entrepreneurships do this all the time … encouraging innovation while keeping improvisation to a minimum probably isn’t in the cards.

And an opinion: Organizations that want to innovate will be more successful applying a combination of improvisation — creating quick-and-dirty prototypes — and Agile-like incremental change that builds on itself, than by taking the waterfallish approach of trying to create a perfect design before implementing anything.

That’s because the whole point of innovation, just as it is for improvisation, is to do something different than anything you’ve done before.

The word for people who think they can do this all at once is “arrogant.” Because while the word is typically used to describe people who think they have nothing to learn from anyone else, it’s also a reasonable description of people who think they have nothing to learn from their future selves — who they’ll be when they’re better-informed than they are right now.

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