Ethics in Business and Sport

Today while walking the dogs, I was thinking about parallels between business and sport. No, not the aspect that first might leap to mind, about winners and losers. And you know, I don’t think either business or sport is primarily about those two categories in the first place. 

Imagine that an industry or even a profession is like a sport. Healthcare, tech, banking, investments, law, medicine, academics, manufacturing, are in a sense analogous to big overall team sports like football, baseball, basketball, and soccer. Individual companies, firms, or practices in those industries or professions are akin to teams, and they have within them more teams. An industry, or profession, like a sport, provides us human beings with a framework where we can develop our talents, grow, and make a difference in the world.

Hang with me for a minute. Let’s think of business and sport as frameworks, or matrices, within which human talent can be developed, molded, and unleashed to pursue excellence, and perhaps greatness. As such, they are spiritual endeavors. Leaders are needed in all such frameworks. So are strategies and tactics and education or training. And I think talent then has to be developed in three ways:

1. Through the development of skill.

2. Through the development of character.

3. Through the development of intellect.

Excellence depends on all three. The skill component is the most obvious. Football players need to learn to tackle, and block, and handle a ball. Basketball players need to develop skills of moving, defending, passing, rebounding, and shooting. But character is just as important. Excellence in any competitive sport or industry requires courage, grit, tenacity, determination, persistence and honesty. At its highest and broadest levels, it requires empathy, kindness, and fairness to others. And then there is the mind. Great performers hone their minds, cultivate their intellectual understanding, and then know how to use the deeper realms of the mind, such as the unconscious, or the imagination, to go where no one has gone before and do what no one has done before.

Ethics in business, a profession, or a sport, is about being true to those three forms of development, while being true to yourself and others. Nothing less is ever genuinely great. So ethics is never just icing on the cake. It’s a crucial aspect of the entire baking endeavor, and the cake itself. Of course, the Greek word from which ethics derives, ethos, meant character. The character of a team, business, or professional endeavor depends on the development of individual skill, character, and intellect on the part of all the players involved. Their proper personal growth makes possible great teamwork, which then makes possible further growth, in what philosophers call a virtuous circle of flourishing. This is the power of ethics in everything.

Dogs Chasing Their Tails

The biggest danger in a capitalist economy is that we all become dogs chasing our tails. In the weight room the other day, a number of us began to discuss the benefits and perils of modern capitalism as we lifted. The conversation was spurred by one of our number commenting on how outrageous online news story titles have become. People will say anything to get you to click on their story, whether the title and lead-in have anything to do with the content of the piece or not. It's All Hyperbole All The Time. When Aliens do land on the White House Lawn, we won't believe it for a second - even if Donald Trump is swearing it took place and that it was the MOST INCREDIBLE THING THAT EVER HAPPENED and that, no, it wasn't how he came to be among us in the first place.

Here's the problem. Any country that gets the blessing of free market capitalism sees a decrease in poverty and an increase in living standards for lots of people. And for a while, things look very promising. And then, before you know what's happened, you get billionaire oligarchs, people moving money around for no reason other than profit, lots of people chasing oversize profits, and everyone else struggling. You also get an economy in which we all become dogs chasing our tails.

What's corrupted journalism? It's become a big business, chasing clicks and eyeballs. Why? Because it's really chasing advertising dollars. In medicine, doctors are trying to see more patients for more profits. Drug companies are trying to charge more for life-saving drugs. Lawyers are desperate for more billable hours. And here's what eventually happens. Years ago, backstage before a talk, I met the CEO of a very large drug store chain. I said, "How's business?" He said, "It's been a terrible flu season." I said, "I don't know anyone with the flu." He said, "Exactly."

It took me a second to realize what he was saying. And how he was thinking.

Our weight room talk became a discussion of the professions. Traditionally, something was a profession when the pursuit of it had to do mostly with internal motivators - doing an excellent job, serving people well, providing a useful and satisfying product or service. Medicine, law, journalism, and education were all professions. But mom and pop grocery stores and local clothing shops and corner bookstores had a lot in common with them, as well. Work was about making a positive difference for your neighbors and fellow human beings. Do that well, and you'd make a good living. But then the professions became businesses, focused on the bottom line and profits. And that unintentionally created distractions, distortions, corruptions, and ultimately the sort of mindsets represented by the drug store CEO.

Fifty years ago, doctors had to make a living. So did people in all the professions. But they weren't chasing profits first and foremost. Even businesses outside the professions could view profits as wonderful side effects of pursuing other valuable things well, and not as the focal point of everything.

When dogs are healthy and normal, and do things right, their tails follow along right behind them, as a matter of course. They go places, do things, and have a great time. They don't have to worry about the tail not accompanying them. It keeps up. But when their focus changes and they start chasing their own tails, well, they go around and around in circles and never get anywhere.

We can't let our economy and society become nothing but dogs chasing their own tails. We need to go out in pursuit of things that matter and take a healthier view that the profits we need will accompany good work, following us where we usefully go with the right things in view.

Otherwise, as another modern image has it, the view never changes.