Ethical choices in a crisis

Imagine this: you are the local country head of a global, billion-dollar investment bank. Through weekly conference calls and updates, you know that your company is facing a cash crunch due to a worldwide seizure in the credit markets, and you are nervous about the company’s future. Business, however, must go on. One day, your regional boss instructs you to market a new series of financial products, to be distributed through local banks to retail investors. The financial products are themselves quite complicated and, in your opinion, rather risky, as they are essentially bets that companies will or will not go bankrupt. However, taking a look at the prospectuses and the marketing material, you see that they are couched in investor friendly phrases designed to give the impression they are safe and secure, as they are backed by the full faith and guarantee of your own bank. Your regional boss tells you to launch the products ASAP and is breathing down your neck every day for sales. Meanwhile, your own questions about the health of your own company are swatted away. What do you do?

In my last column, I explained how both the smart and ethical thing for a company to do in a crisis was to act swiftly and communicate clearly to affected customers. However, not everyone who reads this column is a company boss! What if you, a regional head or the marketing director, are given instructions contrary to ethical standards, such as an order to sell tainted milk powder where health standards are lax, or to market risky bets as safe financial investments? What are your options?

Just do your job. You may try to assure yourself and say, I’m only doing my job. Whether that is a good defense in a trial (yes, you have to start thinking in such terms) depends on your seniority in the company or your level of knowledge of the company’s policies, products and potential wrongdoings. I would say the moment you know what is going on, you can forget about this option. Also, you have your posterity and your afterlife to consider!

Compromise. This is especially attractive when any harm caused is debatable or quasi-legal. (“The fine print clearly says customers may lose all their money.”) So, in the banking scenario, while your unethical colleagues are selling Lehman Minibonds to pensioners, you target richer ones who can afford to lose a couple of hundred thousand. I don’t really think much about this option: it’s very difficult and it’s not worth it. By definition, you are compromising your ability to hit your targets, and for what upside?

Quit. Walk away. Life is not worth getting into moral scrapes which can imperil your career and, well, your soul. Throw in your resignation letter, try to get a waiver on your notice period, pay the company back if necessary, because the longer you work in a ethically imperiled company, the greater the risk of that peril extending to you. However, as Jeff Skilling, the former CEO of Enron discovered, even resigning did not save him from prosecution.

Blow the whistle. Time to burn your bridges and go to the authorities. Nowadays, even this option has various ways of doing it – from writing an anonymous memo to the boss (as Sherryn Watkins did in Enron) to going directly to the press (Citizen Nades would be your man) or, if you really want to protect yourself, going directly to the prosecutor’s office and striking a deal, in exchange for immunity. Just make sure your deal is airtight and agreed in the presence of your lawyer, and that, this being Malaysia, the company you are informing on doesn’t have, well, certain political connections, in which case your only option would be the opposition party.

If the above four choices all do not sound very appealing, its because they are not. Each has their difficulties and one’s choices would depend on one’s actual circumstances and ethical limits. The important thing to balance is doing the right thing, but also preserving your career and your personal reputation. Its easy falling into a hole. Climbing out is hard. Climbing out and staying clean is even harder.

As seen in theSun, 30th October 2008.