Not if you plan on climbing the corporate ladder. The further up you go, the more likely lies on your resume will be caught.

Take a lesson from Gregory Probert, the president and COO of Herbalife, who, according to the WSJ, was caught having lied on his resume and now must step down. His fabricated M.B.A. from Cal State went unnoticed for over 20 years. Then Mr. Minkow, a fraud investigator, in trying to dig up dirt on Herbalife uncovered the deception.

Had Gregory Probert been a low level employee, he would not have gotten scrutiny from the Mr. Minkows of the world. However, as a high ranking executive, he not only gathers more attention, but his resume is more public.

Detractors are not the only sources of scrutiny resume liars need to worry about as they succeed. Winning awards can be risky as well. Janet Cooke, a writer for the Washington Post in 1980, lied on her resume and fabricated a story about an 8-year old heroin addict. She won the Pulitzer for it. Her sudden fame brought her credentials to the attention of people in a position to know they were faked. Further investigation revealed the story about the 8-year old heroin addict was faked as well. The Pulitzer was returned — for the first time ever.

Finally, the fall from grace from these heights is usually hard and permanent. The talented Janet Cooke has since lived a life in obscurity. Gregory Probert’s prospects have likely diminished greatly as well.

The chance resume lies catch up with you increases with every promotion, every award, and every success.

Tags: GregoryProbert, herbalife, resume, lying, clint korver, ethics for the real world

Randy Paush became an online phenomenon last September when he gave his final lecture at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. Randy is dying of pancreatic cancer. His last lecture has been viewed by millions on the internet. Well worth watching if you haven’t seen it already.

In his last few months he has been focused on his wife and kids, ages 6, 3, and 1. He has also been working with Jeffrey Zaslow to write a book offering his life lessons, mostly focused on an audience of three. As Randy puts it, “I’m attempting to put myself in a bottle that will one day wash up on the beach for my children.” Here is one of his messages:

“If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, ‘Tell the truth.’ If I got three more words, I’d add, ‘All the time.’ ” A Final Farewell - WSJ.com

Tags: randypaush, tell the truth, lying, clint korver, ethics for the real world

The New York Magazine recently ran a great story entitled “Learning to Lie” which explores why kids lie. Here are a few of the shocking statistics from a study done by Dr. Nancy Darling:

• 98 percent of kids say trust and honesty are essential in personal relationships
• 96-98 percent (depending on age) think lying is morally wrong
• yet, 98 percent of teens report lying to their parents

How does this double standard happen? According to Dr. Victoria Talwar, a leading expert on children’s lying behavior, kids in part learn this from their parents. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships.” This training is reinforced when a child is praised for white lies, such as saying they like a present when they really don’t.

“Often, the parents are proud that their kids are ‘polite’—they don’t see it as lying,” Talwar remarks. She’s regularly amazed at parents’ seeming inability to recognize that white lies are still lies.

When adults are asked to keep diaries of their own lies, they admit to about one lie per every five social interactions, which works out to one per day, on average. The vast majority of these lies are white lies, lies to protect yourself or others, like telling the guy at work who brought in his wife’s muffins that they taste great or saying, “Of course this is my natural hair color.”

Encouraged to tell so many white lies and hearing so many others, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally, a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict.

Are Kids Copying Their Parents When They Lie? — New York Magazine

Something to think about.

Tags: lies, lying, ethics, ethics for the real world, clint korver

The Ethics Resource Center, an organization which studies the ethical practices of public and private institutions, just released their report on the ethics of Nonprofit institutions in the US. It’s not pretty.

Ethics Resource Center: Celebrating 85 Years of Ethics Surveying and Research

Some believe that without the pressure to generate a profit, nonprofit organizations would exhibit higher ethical standards than for-profit organizations. However this report, based on data from 558 respondents , paints a different picture. Here are some highlights (or lowlights might be more accurate):

• 6% observed alteration of documents.
• 8% observed alteration of financial records–called financial fraud.
• 14% observed lying to customers, vendors, or the public
• 19% observed misreporting of hours
• 21% observed lying to employees
• 55% observed one or more acts of misconduct

The numbers for business and government are about the same across the board. Business reports 56% observations of misconduct and government 57%. Interestingly the incident of financial fraud seems to be noticeably higher in non-profits (8%) than in either business (5%) or government (5%).

The report goes on to say that when nonprofit employees saw ethical misconduct, 38% of the time they said nothing. They did not report the observed transgression to management.

• 66% of the time they did not report environmental violations,
• 49% of the time they did not report misreporting of hours worked, and
• 31% of the time they did not report stealing.

The primary reasons for staying silent include:

• 50% did not believe corrective action would be taken
• 42% feared retaliation from management or peers (a drop from 64% in 2005)
• 30% would have to report to the person involved.

The report is not all bad. The data show that attention to this issue by creating a Code of Conduct (ethical code), engaging in ethics training, creating a hotline for reporting, and others dramatically decreases incidents of misconduct.

Overall this report shows that people in the nonprofit sector fall prey to the same shortcomings and temptations as those in the for-profit sector. People are people regardless of their context. Ethics are important regardless of the context.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: nonprofit, ethics, ethics for the real world, clint korver, Ethics Resource Center,

In the celebrity gossip section of The San Jose Mercury News this morning I found this bit of gossip right next to a detailed account of Obama’s bowling skills:

CBS anchor Katie Couric was to read her 12-year-old daughter’s favorite poem at a literary event at Avery Fisher Hall in Manhattan this week. But first she had a little confession to make. “Most people don’t know this, but I am a published poet. My first poem was published in the St. James Grammar School Gazette. It was a poem about snow. I’ve never told anyone that I plagiarized that poem. It was really written by Penny Eastman. After 45 years of keeping that secret, I am relieved to finally get it off my chest.” San Jose Mercury News

Just think about this for a second — Ms. Couric has been carrying the burden of her deception for 45 years–45 YEARS. I bet this is not some oops and by the way kind of thing for her. She remembers the situation vividly. She not only knows it was about snow but also that it was really written by Penny Eastman. How many of your assignments from grammer school do you remember? How many of the sources you read for those assignments do you remember?

The phenomenon of being able to vividly recall ethical transgressions is quite common. When teaching ethics we ask the students to describe an ethically sensitive situation they have encountered in their past. Students can recall incidents from years ago as if they happened yesterday because the incidents still bother them. Their anxiety keeps it fresh in their minds.

One of the fundamental reasons to avoid lying is because it minimizes our psychic burdens. Forget the effects on other people for the moment. Every ethical transgression becomes part of the story we tell ourselves. We may try to rationalize or repress, but we always know the truth. We know we did something we should not have done.

Given proper reflection, past mistakes can have powerful learning value. When our students discuss and analyze their past situations, they often become a powerful motivation not to not fall prey to the same temptations again. Take a lesson from Katie, and consider the value of a clean conscious next time you are tempted to lie.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: ethics, Clint Korver, Ethics for the Real World, Katie Couric, plagerism, lying

The WSJ today ran a major expose on the cozy relationship between Southwest and the FAA.

Southwest’s Ties Triggered Tumult: Allegations made by two FAA inspectors that Southwest Airlines was trying to pick and choose which inspectors regulated it have rattled the industry and sparked broad debate about the adequacy of airline regulation.

Business Financial News, Business News Online & Personal Finance News at WSJ.com - WSJ.com

While the focus of this article and many others on the topic is on Southwest exerting inappropriate influence, the most troubling ethical issue is the conduct of the FAA.

Here is the short story: two FAA inspectors, Bobby Boutris and Douglas Peters, claim the FAA looked the other way as Southwest flew 46 planes long past their mandatory inspection dates — without them being inspected. After much back and forth (I’ll get to that in a moment) Southwest finally had the 46 aircraft inspected to find that 6 planes had cracks in the fuselage, or skin, and dozens more were long overdue for checkups of the backup rudder-control mechanisms.

The WSJ and others assert that Southwest exerted undue influence in which inspectors were assigned to their case and then in how the inspectors reported (or did not report) violations.

Certainly Southwest’s attempts to deceive people about their compliance with maintenance requirements is an ethical issue. We can speculate on how it happened — Southwest probably had “really good reasons” to deceive. The Southwest compliance team might have been thinking “we have a great track record, FAA inspections is useless bureaucracy–we do far superior inspections ourselves, and it is prohibitively expense for no value other than checking the box.” Or, explantion 2: perhaps the compliance team just forgot the structural inspections on these planes.

Let’s go with explanation 1 for the moment, because here is where the really scary ethical stuff happens. It would appear that the FAA (or at least some key individuals in the FAA) engaged in a fairly vigorous effort to keep this deception and possible others from being uncovered.

- When Mr. Boutris initially found evidence that the inspections may have been missed, Southwest four days later issued a “voluntary disclosure” claiming falsely that all the inspections had been performed. Now it would be one thing for Southwest to mislead on this issue, but the disclosure was co-authored by a Mr. Gawadzinski, Mr. Boutris’s supervisor no less!

- After receiving an anonymous complaint about his work on this matter, Mr. Boutris was taken off his inspection duties and was ordered to turn over all his Southwest work to Mr. Gawadzinski.

- In a prior issue regarding a lightening strike to a Southwest aircraft, Southwest was required to pay a civil penalty but it really did not want the FAA to issue the normally required press release. According to Mr. Peters, his supervisor, again Mr. Gawadzinski, “suggested to Mr. Peters, with a wink, that he had used a ruse to have a press release on the reduced penalyt put out briefly, but then had rescinded it due to at ‘typographical error,’ according to Mr. Peterer’s statement. Mr. Peters said Mr. Gawadzinski told him the agency had met its legal requirement, and ‘another release wasn’t going to be put out.’”

It is not reported what else Mr. Boutris did to bring these issues to the attention of his management, but by last fall, he became so fed up with his management’s approach that he brought this situation to the attention of the Office of Special Counsel who, after finding the allegations credible, alerted Congress and here we are.

It would be easy, but inappropriate, to lay all of this at the feet of a few bad individuals inside the FAA. Transgressions such as these are often indicative of the culture of an organization. Mr. Boutris, in his statement to the Office of Special Counsel wrote “[for three years] the message I have been getting is not to ‘rock the boat.’”

Rep. James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who is chairman of the House Transportation and and Infrastructure Committee investing this matter, has it right when he said “we need a change of attitude at the highest levels of the FAA.”

Tags: southwest, FAA, ethics, truth, telling, airlines, clint korver, ethics for the real world, ethical culture,