Paradigms...where shift happens!

Doing the right thing?

Is the term "corporate ethics" oxymoronic? A friend of mine was just laid off from a position with a NYSE traded company after years of service that went way above and beyond the call of duty. The news was delivered by telephone in the middle of a business trip while my friend was far away from any familial support system. The company had enjoyed the benefits of her considerable intellect, her total loyalty and her willingness to work hundred hour plus weeks during which she accomplished what a team of people could not do in a similar time frame. The abilities she had demonstrated over the years had led them to press her to relocate half way across the country to take on a project that no one else could manage and that was so fouled up it appeared beyond salvation. Is loyalty a one way street where the traffic is controlled only by dollars signs and decimal points?

I was reading a couple of speeches delivered by novelist Pat Conroy yesterday in which he mentioned people who did the right thing simply because it was the right thing. Conroy himself paid for Shannon Faulkner's undergraduate education after she left the Citadel. He did it, according to him, as a kind of penance for the shabby treatment she had experienced at his alma mater as the first woman to be admitted. 

Last weekend I watched a movie called "Radio" where Ed Harris played the role of a man who did the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do. When asked by his school principal why he had taken a young black man played by Cuba Gooding under his wing, he said simply that it had seemed like the right thing to do. It was a dramatization of a true story so it wasn't entirely fictional.

Are corporations losing their ability to make these kinds of ethical decisions? Does the term "best practices" now mean only "what's most expedient for the company and the decision makers"?  Maybe I don't understand enough about business and maybe I'm too naive to accept that there are tough decisions that a business must make. I've always been a bit of an idealist though and I hope I never become calloused to the point that I believe that the means justify the ends.

Not 5 minutes but a microslice of time

Yesterday evening on The Theodore Roosevelt Bridge near Washington DC.
Headed outbound towards the Virginia side of the Potomac River.
I had missed the turn for the Kennedy Center where we had tickets for the 7:30 PM performance of Romeo & Juliet by the Kirov Ballet and we were stuck going across the bridge, looking for a place where we could loop around and head back into the city to try again, like a missed approach while landing a plane.
It was only a moment, a slice of time with no real significance to every car on the bridge but one.
I heard a metallic sound behind my van.

For some reason I looked out my rear view mirror and saw a moment of real significance for whoever was in the SUV I saw cartwheeling in the traffic behind me. That's the first time I have ever seen a moment like that as it happened. It's frozen there in my memory...no, it wasn't in slow motion like the moviemakers would have us think. This vehicle was rolling, no spinning is more like it...spinning time after time along it's long axis and even bouncing a bit as the side of the car hit the pavement. I'm sure I could hear the sound of it, even the crunching sound of the glass as the windshield and side windows disintegrated with the impact of each contact with the roadway.

By the time we had turned and come back inbound on the bridge there were emergency vehicles everywhere. I'm so glad I wasn't behind that vehicle. We surely would have been involved in the wreck just because the spectacle would have frozen our attention on what was happening.

I can see it now as I write this and I wonder about the people in that SUV. Did anyone just walk away?

5 minutes

It was back on January 4th that I finished my last pack of cigarettes. Dealing with kicking the habit was easier this time than in earlier efforts, at least it seemed that way. I'm not anywhere near being out of the woods yet but I'm finding it a little easier to put off the urge to burn one for 5 minutes each time that urge strikes. They say that if you fight it off for 5 minutes the desire to smoke goes away, at least for a while; I think it's true. I just have to remember to fight the good fight for 5 minutes...5 minutes at a time...not a lifetime but just 5 stupid minutes. 

There was a pretty strong motivator involved in this effort but I'll tell you about that later...maybe.