Your Mother Should Know

The comedian George Carlin liked to quip, “Business ethics is an oxymoron.” 

While most people on the receiving end of commerce would likely agree, having spent over forty years inside various businesses, I would rephrase Carlin's gag: Business ethics may not be an oxymoron, but it sure is an oddity.

It's as odd in the workplace as frontal nudity, purple hair and Hitler mustaches. 

Most business executives are decent folks who—to my view, anyway—conveniently "park their ethics at the door" along with their BMWs. Their workweek amorality doesn't make of them monsters or mobsters, but it does lend credence to Balzac's claim, "Behind every great fortune is a crime;" or a misdemeanor, at the least.

You'd think they would have learned right from wrong from their mothers.

Thank heaven there's now a guidebook for the ethically-challenged executive—one perfectly timed for the current global crisis.

Crisis Ahead, by crisis-management expert Edward Segal, provides a 250-page map through the corporate crisis minefield. But Crisis Ahead seeks to do more than that: it seeks to convert business ethics from an oddity to a commodity.

Segal is the author of a previous how-to, Getting Your 15 Minutes of Fame and More!, a cookbook for ambitious executives hungry for glory. Crisis Ahead is, in a way, that earlier book's "evil twin," a checklist for amoral executives eager to avoid the press's attention, a possible pillorying, or—worse—a pink slip.

Whereas the majority of books on business ethics—written by philosophers for b-school professors—are as impractical as they are impenetrable, Crisis Ahead is daringly straightforward, simple and "strictly business."

Segal states in his introduction—which includes a late-breaking essay on the Covid-19 crisis—that Crisis Ahead comprises only "quick, practical advice." The author's tips are aimed not at the academic, but at the business executive who needs to "prepare for, prevent, manage, and recover from a crisis, scandal, disaster, or other emergency." 

In other words, you'll find no theories, models or conundrums here. Crisis Ahead instead offers a bagful of "lessons learned" from illicit schemes, inside deals, sex scandals, errant emails and shoddy products, as well as no fewer than "101 best practices" intended for the beleaguered executive who needs to know "what to do in the moment: what levers to pull and what moves to make in real time when faced with a crisis." 

You also won't find terms like "environmental justice" or "social entrepreneurship" anywhere in the text; nor the names of philosophers, psychologists or theologians in the index.

So why consider Crisis Now a book on ethics? (Amazon—no paragon of the topic—has done just that, listing the book under both public relations and business ethics; but we'll set that aside for now.) 

The reason becomes clear when you read "Edward's Takes," brief sidebars by the author that accompany each case study. While these reflections consider "how well or poorly the company, organization, or individual did in responding to—or in some cases creating—a crisis," the vast majority also shine a light on the myriad misdeeds that led to the crises in the first place.

Time and again, we learn that executives themselves—not some error, accident, or act of God—bring about the catastrophes; that unscrupulous executives are indeed their own worse enemies.

You'd have thought they'd have learned better.