Bob Stone on Ethics
Bob Stone is an internationally known author and speaker on ethical leadership, leading change, and reinventing government. He teaches ethics and business at the University of Redlands and formerly served on the Governing Council of the Ukleja Center for Ethical Leadership at California State University, Long Beach. Read more about Bob Stone...
Ethics, Religion, and Father Greg Boyle, SJ
Business ethics students often ask me what’s the connection between ethics and religion, and I stumble to answer, something like all religions share the Golden Rule, which is the heart of ethics. As Hillel said in the 1st century, “All else is commentary.”
And at the heart of the Golden Rule is the ability to see others as like you, not as “other.” Father Greg Boyle, SJ, must be the world champion at seeing others this way. And he does this in the unlikeliest of environments: the Latino gangland of South Los Angeles, where he ministers to/saves/employs/buries—and most of all, loves—gang members and ex-gang members, most of them covered in tattoos and recently released from incarceration. He created Homeboy Industries, which has given thousands on gang members a path to employment and responsibility.
I first heard Greg Boyle (“G-dog” to his “homies”) being interviewed by Krista Tippett on her “On Being” radio show. He’s such a compelling person that I immediately ordered and read his memoir, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. He’s (obviously) religious and I am not, but his steadfast belief that we are all the same before God is an attitude all of us, believers and not, could strive for. He calls his God “not the ‘one false move’ God but the ‘no matter what’ God.”
The book is heartwarming, funny, heartbreaking, and page-turning. Father Boyle is a man of unbelievable courage, love, compassion, and faith. And a heckuva storyteller.
Special offer on ethics seminars, and on The Ethics Challenge
1) I’ll visit your workplace or school and do a pro bono seminar on either
- The Ethics Challenge: Essential Skills for Leading and Living, or
- The ABCs of Ethical Leadership
If the seminar is out of the LA commuting area I’ll ask you to cover my reasonable expenses.
2) Alternatively (or in addition), you can buy my latest book(co-authored with Mick Ukleja) in hard cover for only $10, with free shipping.
Here are the details on the offers:
Seminars: email me at bobstone17@gmail.com to make arrangements, for
- The Ethics Challenge: Essential Skills for Leading and Living
This is unlike any mandatory ethics training: no talk about FCPA, SEC, or DOJ. It covers what it means to behave ethically, and how that differs from merely behaving legally or in compliance with the rules. I start with the basics: keep your word and follow the Golden Rule. I finish with three essential skills for living and leading. These skills are easy to describe, not so easy to live, but living them will sharpen one’s ethical sensitivity and make it easier to keep strong and to follow one’s good intentions.
or
- The ABCs of Ethical Leadership
The ABCs, are authenticity, buoyancy and conviction. Simple stuff. Authenticity just means be yourself. Buoyancy is raising people up—their spirits and their confidence. And conviction is the absolute absence of doubt. While a leader must be open minded, there are some things that can’t be compromised, and foremost among these is ethics. Not the ethics of traditional ethics training—admonitions against bribery, theft, conflict of interest, or misuse of the organization’s assets—but the ethical principles that we all have known since childhood. These combine in each of us to form our “unenforceables,” the rules of behavior that we have to follow because of what’s inside us, not because some external authority forces us to.
The book: To purchase The Ethics Challenge: Strengthening Your Integrity in a Greedy World, (hard-cover edition), email me with your postal address and I’ll send you an invoice for $10 through Paypal. When you use your credit or debit card to pay Paypal I’ll mail you the book, and I’ll pay the shipping.
Alternatively for $5.99 you can purchase the Kindle version or theNook version through Amazon or Barnes and Noble, respectively.
Subway’s ‘FOOTLONG’ is a description, not a measurement
Years ago on a cold day I bought a hot dog from a vendor outside Philadelphia’s Franklin Field, and after biting into it and getting a chill in my teeth I asked the boy who sold it how he could call it a HOT dog when it wasn’t even warm. He responded, “It’s just the NAME, not the TEMP-A-CHOOR.”
Two years ago the boy’s remark was topped by a spokesman for then-Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ), who explained an outrageous lie that the Senator had told about Planned Parenthood, ‘his remark was not intended to be a factual statement.”
And now Subway (Australia), whose footlong sandwiches have been discovered to be only eleven inches long, gave their explanation: ” ‘SUBWAY FOOTLONG’ is a registered trademark as a descriptive name for the sub sold in Subway Restaurants and not intended to be a measurement of length.”
(Thanks to New York Post for the photo)
Should you beware of your tour guide? Even in Turkey?
I think Turks are more honest than most, and I’ve written several times about how hard it is to lose a wallet in Turkey because some Turk will always pick it up and track you down to return it. In contrast, when a friend lost her wallet in front of the Whole Foods market in Westwood—an upscale part of Los Angeles, right by UCLA—it vanished without a trace. I wouldn’t be surprised if Turkey was the only place in the world where you just can’t lose a wallet.
So what to think when Today’s Zaman, Turkey’s top English language newspaper, runs an exposé headlined, “Beware of your tour guide”?
The article, along with a follow-on piece, gives several examples of
“tourists who are taken advantage of by a licensed, professional tour guide, someone who they have hired to show them the historic sites of the city, who builds up a sense of trust and who then knowingly fleeces them out of additional money after they have already paid a sometimes hefty fee for a guided tour.”
The scams mainly involve kickbacks from shops and restaurants who jack up their prices and share the loot with the unscrupulous guides who bring the poor trusting tourists to be fleeced.
So should you beware? No and yes. No, because you’ll forego an enriching experience if the warning makes you avoid guides altogether. Some of my most rewarding travel experiences have been with licensed guides, particularly Arzu Tutuk Altinay in Istanbul and Atil Ulas Cuce in Cappadocia.
But yes as well. Use common sense, check them out, and don’t give someone you don’t know carte blanche to choose your restaurant, carpet dealer, jeweler, or spice shop. Even in a country where honesty predominates there are sharpies and crooks looking for you. So hire a guide, be enriched by the knowledge she has, and—always—think for yourself.
Zero Dark Thirty: Did torture lead us to Osama bin Laden?
See Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a terrific yarn about the search for Osama bin Laden and about the remarkable raid that killed him. Jessica Chastain is perfect as the real-life CIA agent assigned to the case as a rookie. She starts, sensibly enough, with little confidence, but steadily grows into a single-minded pain-in-the-ass who won’t let anybody, up to the director, get in the way of her search. When the CIA director is finally told that the Agency is “60 per cent confident” of bin Laden’s hiding place, Chastain shouts from the back row, “It’s 100 per cent certain.”
The movie starts with a CIA agent torturing a detainee, with Chastain looking on nervously. There is a strong implication that torture produced information that had an important role in finding UBL, as bin Laden is known in the film.
Now there is a firestorm swirling around the movie, with senators knowledgeable in intelligence arguing that torture played no part in finding UBL, and the neocons and the right arguing that of course it did.
So did it?
The film’s director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal issued this statement:
“This was a 10-year intelligence operation brought to the screen in a two-and-a-half-hour film. We depicted a variety of controversial practices and intelligence methods that were used in the name of finding bin Laden. The film shows that no single method was necessarily responsible for solving the manhunt, nor can any single scene taken in isolation fairly capture the totality of efforts the film dramatizes. One thing is clear: the single greatest factor in finding the world’s most dangerous man was the hard work and dedication of the intelligence professionals who spent years working on this global effort. We encourage people to see the film before characterizing it.”
For many years before Zero Dark Thirty, arguments raged about whether torture was acceptable, and the arguments turned largely on whether torture—euphemized into enhanced interrogation because torture is illegal—was effective. Arguing for torture was the CIA; opposing it was most of the FBI. FBI agents reported that detainees that were treated decently, even kindly, were founts of valuable intelligence until CIA interrogators took over and turned to torture, at which point the detainees clammed up.
Bigelow’s and Boal’s sources were largely CIA, so it figures that they were told that torture played an important role. Had their sources been FBI the movie’s depiction of the interrogations would have different.
So did torture lead us to UBL? I’m inclined to think that it was of little help, but I can’t really know. See the movie and keep an open mind.
Romney’s little joke, heh heh: “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate”
How do you encourage the right-wing idiocy that Obama was born in Kenya and thus an illegitimate President, while not getting the tar of hate on yourself? Why, by making a little “joke” about it, like Mitt Romney did today while campaigning in Michigan.
“I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital. I was born in Harper Hospital,” Romney said. “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.”
The text says I’m one of you. The subtext says my opponent is an “other,’ not like us at all. Romney, who is used to getting away with irresponsible language in his prepared texts, often shows his true self when ad libbing. His prepared texts say that he knows that Obama was born in the United States. His true self says, encourage the crazies to hate Obama and to vote for me.
<a href=”http://www.hypersmash.com”>www.hypersmash.com</a>
Did Mitt Romney really say he was too important to go to Vietnam?
There’s a fake report all over the internet that Mitt Romney said he was “too important to go to Vietnam.”
It’s breathtakingly arrogant, if true, and it’s not true. It originated on a website called “News That’s Almost Reliable,” according to the apparently infallible source of rumor-debunking, Snopes.com.
Romney, the über-hawk who wants to go to war in so many places, got four deferments—all legal—as a young man during the Vietnam war. But whatever he may have thought, there’s no record of his ever saying that he was too important to go to Vietnam.
Shame on whoever started to spread the story. Everybody else, when you hear of a story that’s too good (or too bad) to be true, first use your head, then check it out—not on left-leaning or right-leaning blogs but with reputable news sources, and if there’s any doubt, with Snopes.com.
_________________
Sources: Photo from PoliticalRapids blogspot, idea from Richard Broida via Facebook
Fareed Zakaria made “an unintentional error,” and will be back, says TIME
TIME conducted a “thorough review” of Fareed Zakaria’s work and has exonerated him of wrongdoing. TIME’s statement:
“We have completed a thorough review of each of Fareed Zakaria’s columns for TIME, and we are entirely satisfied that the language in question in his recent column was an unintentional error and an isolated incident for which he has apologized. We look forward to having Fareed’s thoughtful and important voice back in the magazine with his next column in the issue that comes out on September 7.”
Right after Zakaria’s “error” became public and he was suspended by TIME and CNN, a writer, Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic Strategy Institute, called the Washington Post to level a careless and scurrilous charge that Zakaria had plagiarized from him. The Post, just as careless, published the new charge without taking the five minutes that would have proven Prestowitz’s charge to have not a shred of truth to it.
Hooray for conservative columnist David Frum, who immediately wrote a blistering refutation of the Post charges yesterday in the Daily Beast, and then challenged three Post editors to correct the record. Today the Post issued a retraction and apology:
“The Post should have examined copies of the books and should not have published the article. We regret the error and apologize to Fareed Zakaria.”
I wrote four days ago that Zakaria would “long be diminished by the label, plagiarizer.” I hope not: he shouldn’t be. He is instead, a serious human being who made an unintentional error. I look forward to learning a lot from his future columns and telecasts.
______________
Inspiration: David Frum and the Daily Beast. Source: Daily Beast and Huffington Post
The face of Great Britain’s Olympics: an observant Muslim named Mohamed Farah wins the 5,000 meters to the screams of 80,000
Mohamed Farah didn’t win as many medals as Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt, but he was surely the great hero of the Olympics, at least to his British countrymen. He did what only four had done before him: win both the 10,000 meters and the 5,000, two races that along with the marathon, take the greatest toll on the human body.
It was thrilling to watch Farah move from the rear of the pack to the front, a third of the way through, then hold the lead as one challenger after another made a run at him.
But the most thrilling thing of all was to hear the crowd of 80,000, mostly Britons, screaming without letup, for the final ten minutes of the 13+ minute race. In a country whose reputation has been sullied by some vicious anti-Muslim sentiments and actions, here was the entire stadium yelling themselves hoarse for an observant Muslim who immigrated from Somalia when he was eight.
The roars didn’t let up when, just after crossing the finish line Farah prostrated himself in the ritual sajdah on the track facing Mecca. Nor did they diminish when he wrapped the Union Jack around his shoulders and took a victory lap around the track.
Hooray for Farah, hooray for Great Britain, and a last hooray for the London Olympics.
_____________
Inspiration: Al Michaels, NBC; and Esther Addley, UK Guardian
Special offer on ethics seminars, and on The Ethics Challenge
1) I’ll visit your workplace or school and do a pro bono seminar on either
· The Ethics Challenge: Essential Skills for Leading and Living, or
· The ABCs of Ethical Leadership
If the seminar is out of the LA commuting area I’ll ask you to cover my reasonable expenses.
2) Alternatively (or in addition), you can buy my latest book(co-authored with Mick Ukleja) in hard cover for only $10, with free shipping.
Here are the details on the offers:
Seminars: email me at bobstone17@gmail.com to make arrangements, for
· The Ethics Challenge: Essential Skills for Leading and Living
This is unlike any mandatory ethics training: no talk about FCPA, SEC, or DOJ. It covers what it means to behave ethically, and how that differs from merely behaving legally or in compliance with the rules. I start with the basics: keep your word and follow the Golden Rule. I finish with three essential skills for living and leading. These skills are easy to describe, not so easy to live, but living them will sharpen one’s ethical sensitivity and make it easier to keep strong and to follow one’s good intentions.
or
· The ABCs of Ethical Leadership
The ABCs, are authenticity, buoyancy and conviction. Simple stuff. Authenticity just means be yourself. Buoyancy is raising people up—their spirits and their confidence. And conviction is the absolute absence of doubt. While a leader must be open minded, there are some things that can’t be compromised, and foremost among these is ethics. Not the ethics of traditional ethics training—admonitions against bribery, theft, conflict of interest, or misuse of the organization’s assets—but the ethical principles that we all have known since childhood. These combine in each of us to form our “unenforceables,” the rules of behavior that we have to follow because of what’s inside us, not because some external authority forces us to.
The book: To purchase The Ethics Challenge: Strengthening Your Integrity in a Greedy World, (hard-cover edition), email me with your postal address and I’ll send you an invoice for $10 through Paypal. When you use your credit or debit card to pay Paypal I’ll mail you the book, and I’ll pay the shipping.
Alternatively for $5.99 you can purchase the Kindle version or theNook version through Amazon or Barnes and Noble, respectively.
