The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [26]
And we did. Based on our findings we came up with a plan to upgrade the total standard of living for the workers. Our first instinct was to provide the workers with physical things such as better housing, better transportation to the groves, gloves for picking, ice water servers in the groves, and other amenities. Old housing was bulldozed. But our second thought was that simple welfare was not enough. Accordingly, we sent a team of behavioral scientists to Florida to plan a comprehensive program that would face up to the basic human problems involved. As a result of their study, the company opened a clinic and established social service centers offering child care, preschool training, and adult education. In addition wages and insurance benefits were increased. And community organizations were established, governed by the workers.
The farm workers union arrived and despite some initial unrest we managed to settle the issues amicably and from that point on, until most of the groves were sold or converted to other uses, our relationship with the migrant workers was positive.
As Austin said, we just could not, as a matter of conscience, tolerate the terrible circumstances of the migrant workers. It was not just public relations. It was the right thing to do.
To maintain public confidence in our capitalist system it must be managed by men and women of honor and decency. I am deeply troubled by the study at Rutgers indicating that of all graduate students, MBA students are the most likely to cheat. Recently it was reported that a number of MBA programs are beginning to touch on ethics issues and organize courses with “Business Ethics” in their titles. I hope they are successful. Yet if such courses are taught by faculty members who typically have no practical experience in the business world, the efforts will be less than effective. The real world is where you must decide ethical issues on a daily basis.
My father certainly needed no such ethics course. He was raised with the midwestern value that your word is your bond, and a man’s handshake is as good as all the contracts in lawyerdom. My father would have agreed with Peter Drucker that there is no such thing as business ethics. Just ethics. It’s not separate from the rest of your life. If you have a Rolodex of ethics or values for various circumstances, you’re not a business person. You’re Tony Soprano!
My father always said that he slept very well. I suspect the old adage is true—“A quiet conscience sleeps in thunder.”
Commandment Six
Don’t Take Time to Think
“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”
—Burrhus Frederic Skinner
WE ARE A technologically obsessed society, and, on balance, that’s a good thing because genuine and often remarkable improvements are made. The tinkerers of the past, like Edison, gave us the lightbulb and the tinkerers of today are giving us unbelievable computer capabilities. Richard Demillo, dean of the college of computing at Georgia Tech, says that we are in a whole new age of innovation. The world continues to change so that I can state with some confidence that most of the technical references in this book are already out of date.
Nevertheless, doing something with technology just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should do it. We frequently add to the complexity of life without gaining any discernible advantage—in fact, at times there are definite disadvantages. My car, for example, comes with a 712-page manual. It has a radio with so many controls and settings that it is difficult to turn it on and equally as difficult to turn it off. That’s certainly counterproductive.