Does Anyone Really Make an Honest Living?

Most of my career has been spent as a middle manager staring up at the top of organizations that on the surface might appear ethically pure, but are far from it.

My first encounter with corruption early in my career was a shocker. I had taken a job with the Boy Scouts of America as a District Executive. My job was to organize units and raise money for the council. Within the first week of being hired, it was revealed to me by my fellow executives that about 15% of the units in my district were "ghost" units. They did not really exist. To make his quotas, the previous executive had paid the fees for children and families who had not actually joined. When I raised this issue to the Scout Executive who ran the council, I was told to meet my numbers under any circumstances and not complain. That was the start of a difficult two years with the Boy Scouts. Being honest about my work was difficult even when I was working with volunteers who exhibited strange or suspicious behavior or talked to the United Way (a major source of council funding), about the real number of youth enrolled in the program. After I left the organization, a group of volunteers independently questioned the council's integrity publicly in a lawsuit.

If an organization that proclaims honesty as a virtue cannot manage to conduct its affairs in an ethical manner, what hope is there for the rest of business, which generally makes no such claim? In fact, dishonesty is almost a celebrated virtue in the rough and tumble world of free market capitalism. "Whatever it takes," right?

Less than forthright practices are everywhere. I've seen the Publisher of a newspaper where I worked orchestrate trade deals for new cars, country club memberships and dance lessons for his daughters. Meanwhile, employees received miniscule raises even as the paper brought in profits of 20-30%. (This was well before the newspaper industry tanked.)

I've witnessed Vice Presidents of Sales "buy off" clients with purchases of expensive bikes, travel and other goods as a means to lock in business.

I've been unwillingly privy to conversations about weekends of paid sex and debauchery among executives with families and children back home.

The environment at these companies often as not turns into exactly what you might expect: Good people victimized by dishonest or abusive behavior from those at the top. But the disturbing truth is that so much of this behavior never comes to light... while people continue to assume they are working for companies or organizations that stand for better values. We work on believing with naivety and hope.

Then you read about debacles like savings and loan scandals, Enron, the current mortgage crisis, and you legitimately wonder: What is the real deal?

Finally, you consider the activities of the top politicians in the country, with secret energy meetings where lobbyists write our policies. When you hear about Presidents locking away their communications or lying about their behavior, it makes you realize why things happen the way they do. Katrina. Iraq. Abu Ghraib. Arrogance about evidence of terrorist activity before 9-11. Putting ideology before fact. It's all part of a pattern of dishonesty that leads to gross deregulation and a loosening of the moral fiber that makes America work. And as we're seeing, there is a price. We are paying it now.

Now the current election rolls on, and one of the main features from the media's perspective is the relative honesty of one campaign versus the other. Shading the truth is one way to get elected, for sure. But it is surely the worst way to run a business, or a country. And the two are looking more and more like one and the same.

Honestly, we can do better.