When Ambition Trumps Ethics

by Howard Gardner

Below is an excerpt from Howard Gardner’s op-ed from The Washington Post:

On Monday, approximately 1,600 freshmen arrived at Harvard College. On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of spending 90 minutes with 20 of these students. They impressed me with their intellect but also with their empathy and willingness to listen to and learn from one another. They were excited by the opportunity to be at Harvard; they used such superlatives that I joked to colleagues that in a few years, they would be so critical, if not cynical, they would have a hard time believing their earlier enthusiasm.

On Thursday, I and many others learned of the university’s largest cheating scandal in living memory. According to news reports, close to half of the 250 undergraduates in “Introduction to Congress” are being investigated for allegedly cheating on a final examination. The fate of individual students is not yet known, but this event will clearly be a stain on Harvard’s reputation as large and consequential as that suffered by the service academies in earlier decades.

Many wonder how this could have happened at “MGU” (man’s greatest university). They will ask whether a large number of the same enthusiastic and loving students I met with Wednesday might well, in a year or two, be part of a cheating scandal themselves. The answer, I fear, is yes.

I’ve been at Harvard for more than half a century — as an undergraduate, a graduate student, a researcher and, for almost three decades, a professor. I know the university well, and in many ways I love it. Yet almost 20 years ago I became concerned about the effect that market ways of thinking has on our society, particularly our young. Colleagues and I undertook a study of “good work.” As part of that study, we interviewed 100 of the “best and brightest” students and spoke with them in depth about life and work.

The results of that study, reported in the book “Making Good,” surprised us. Over and over again, students told us that they admired good work and wanted to be good workers. But they also told us they wanted — ardently — to be successful. They feared that their peers were cutting corners and that if they themselves behaved ethically, they would be bested. And so, they told us in effect, “Let us cut corners now and one day, when we have achieved fame and fortune, we’ll be good workers and set a good example.” A classic case of the ends justify the means.

Read the rest of Gardner’s op-ed

Second Update GoodWork Pilot University Medical Centre The Radboud in Nijmegen, Netherlands, May – July 2011

by Alexandrien Van Der Burgt-Franken

This update of the Pilot in The Radboud Medical Centre is about sessions, methods and cases used from the (translated) GoodWork Toolkit and about our first experiences.

Yolande Witman and Alexandrien worked with three groups: medical heads of clinical departments , residentsphysician, nursing managers and nurse practitioners, 18 persons in sum.

With each group we held four sessions, planned in the period April – July 2011.

Session 1 ‘Good Work’ We started with an interview of the professionals with each other about the question: What makes you a good professional? After that we gave an introduction about the concept of Good Work. Then we asked them to give their opinion about GoodWork of other professions in cases from the toolkit. The professionals thought about criteria of good work of their own profession. We finished the first session with the value sort cards from the toolkit by each participant.  In the last session we will do this again and we are curious if there will be any differences.

Session 2 ‘Excellence’:

We asked every participant to bring along something regarding to what they see as an example of excellent work.  We also discussed the case of Alfred Bloom and the decisions that he made. We asked them to think about excellence and the relation with ethics. For this purpose we used the case about Ethical Values in Business.  After discussing this case we asked them to bring up examples of excellence from their own working experience. That resulted in all groups in inspiring stories, which illustrated the commitment of these professionals with their work.

Session 3 ‘Ethics’ This session started with a reflection about the responsibilities in daily practice and their influence on the work of the participators.  We discussed the case ’ serving a cause versus serving a client’. To conclude, the participants told stories regarding the moral dilemmas they face in their work. Emotional stories with regard to very difficult dilemmas occurred.

Session 4  ‘Engagement’. We started this session with an interview about personal engagement. Is this important in work and for the patient?  How do you want to be a mentor for others?  We discussed a case of the toolkit about mentorship, and after that we had a dialogue about their own experiences with mentors. What would you learn to others? What would you change in your work? They finished with filling in the value sort cards for the second time.

In June the medical staff and the organization decided that also a group of 8 enthusiastic medical students may participate in this pilot. In August and September we scheduled  four sessions with them. Some of them are involved in de movement Compassion for Care.

Next week we will analyze the outcomes and prepare the next joint meeting in September. In October, the groups will exchange their conception and awareness. The results will be presented to the board of the Medical Centre and the rest of the organization.

Yolande and Alexandrien are leading the sessions. Their first impression is that there are different points of views within the groups, this makes the dialogue useful. The differences itself are not the most interesting aspect; the possibility to exchange professional and personal experiences in an open and safe atmosphere makes it very valuable for the professionals.

The toolkit offered us good material, for all four sessions. The toolkit is developed for students, so we changed some exercises to make them more suitable for our senior participants. Because of limited time for each session, we made choices which parts we used. We also think that we have to ‘translate’ some cases to more visible for the Dutch situation. Finally we discovered in practice the importance of Good Work and the GoodWork Toolkit

Before we started to work on this pilot, we knew the GoodWork Project from the chapter Gardner et. al. wrote in the book ‘Professional Pride’. The GoodWork Project provides values of which we believe are very important. This pilot made us see that we are ready to work with the GoodWork Toolkit. The Professional Honor Foundation want to make work of it in different sectors  in the Netherlands. Working with professionals and discussing their work shows the importance of finding the right ‘language’ for Good Work. The cases of the participants confirm the importance of trust towards professionals.

Stay tuned-In September we tell you more about the results of the plenary session and the results in the University Medical Centre in Nijmegen.

Commencement Speech Roundup!

by Margot Locker

With graduation season officially coming to a close, we have compiled a roundup of the some of the top graduation speeches from around the country. We noticed many speakers touched on GoodWork threads in their words to graduating seniors. What were your favorite speeches this year?

President Barack Obama, Barnard College

“So don’t accept somebody else’s construction of the way things ought to be. It’s up to you to right wrongs. It’s up to you to point out injustice. It’s up to you to hold the system accountable and sometimes upend it entirely. It’s up to you to stand up and to be heard, to write and to lobby, to march, to organize, to vote. Don’t be content to just sit back and watch.”

Jane Lynch, Smith College

“If I could do so much of my early life over, I would have taken more moments like this to breathe. I would have spent more time focusing on what was right in front of me, instead of recoiling from what is because it didn’t look or feel exactly as I imagined it. I wouldn’t have been forever trying to look around the corner to see “What’s next, what’s next?!”

Oprah Winfrey, Spelman College

“You must have some vision for your life. Even if you don’t know the plan, you have to have a direction in which you choose to go,” Winfrey said. “What I learned is that that’s a great metaphor for life. You want to be in the driver’s seat of your own life because if you are not, life will drive you.”

Aaron Sorkin, Syracuse University

“Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt”

“Don’t ever forget that you’re a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character.”

Michael Bloomberg, UNC Chapel Hill

“Don’t be afraid to shoot the long ball. Take the risk. Life is too short to spend your time avoiding failure. If I had worried about failure – or listened to those who do – I would never have started my company, and never run for mayor. I can’t imagine my life if I hadn’t taken those risks. Not every risk will work out, but that’s ok. Failure is the world’s best teacher.”

Adam Savage, Sarah Lawrence College

“Stay obsessed. That thing you can’t stop thinking about? Keep indulging it. Obsession is the better part of success. You will be great at the things that you can’t not do.”

“Be willing to be wrong. Don’t fight for your idea just because you want the credit. Fight for your idea because it’s the right one. If it’s not, let it go and put your muscle behind the right one. Trust your instincts.”

Colin Powell, Northeastern University

“Make public service a part of your life.”

“Do something that gives you satisfaction every day and makes our society a better place.”

Bob Woodruff, Boston College

“Let me say that I do understand that not every single person gets to find passion in their job—for some people what they do is a vocation—but people find passion in other aspects of their life, whether it’s playing music or writing books, building boats, cooking or running marathons.  Whatever it may be, I urge you to find and feed a passion.”

A Major Bank Scandal: Where does the Buck Stop?

by Amelia Peterson

In recent weeks, the press in England (or Britain) has been full of stories of the fallout from  a startling revelation: At various points over the past five years, Barclays bank has been fiddling with the LIBOR rate. LIBOR, or the London interbank lending rate, (in theory) reflects the interest rate banks are charged when they borrow from each other. The rate is set by banks all self-reporting the charge they have had to pay in recent weeks. However, the rate then goes on to influence the short term interest rate for loans all around the world, so it is of some import that it be an accurate estimate.The scandal is idiomatic of most cases of corporate wrongdoing: it is unclear who should be deemed ‘responsible’. As is usually the case in Britain, the CEO, in this case Bob Diamond, has left. Most commentators appear to have favour this ‘buck stops at the top’ approach.

A more diffuse picture of responsibility appears in comments that this scandal is yet another sign that the ‘culture’ of financial services must change. I fully acknowledge the power of norms, but I wonder if the LIBOR case is not an important opportunity to highlight individual responsibility throughout an organisation. In the Financial Services Authority report of the case, the individual traders, managers and rate submitters whose e-mails evidence the action are referred to only by letters of the alphabet. Yet it is these individuals who should be facing questions from MPs. In his session, Bob Diamond could claim repeatedly, ‘I did not know’, and the MPs could press him no further. But the traders and submitters would have had to provide some answer for their actions, some account of what they were thinking and why they did it.

Ultimately, this scandal came about at the level of individual decisions. We may trace those decisions back to wider factors about industry norms and incentives but further missteps will only be avoided if in the future an individual bank worker steps back and thinks: I do have another option here; and if I choose to participate in a fraud, I will be and should be held fully culpable.

So far I’ve described only one particular model of responsibility– one where we are responsible for what we directly cause.  There are other understandings of responsibility. Journalist Deborah Orr here describes Bob Diamond and Barclays as symptomatic of a private sector that, on the one hand, calls for small government but, on the other, does not take ‘responsibility’ for meeting society’s needs. This view presents a picture where we all share in responsibility for a good society. Likewise a current series of articles on ‘sustainable business’ asks about the limits of corporations’ responsibility, posing the question in terms of environmental concerns. This is responsibility as taking heed of the long-term view and ‘doing your bit’ to help us get there.

We would do well to endorse as broad a conception of responsibility as possible, but there is also a liability in the above approaches. In defining responsibility too widely, companies can pick and choose which areas they will take a stand on, and which they will quietly shirk. ‘Corporate social responsibility’ is often mocked as a cover for greater sins, and sometimes this stance seems warranted. Barclays had a very comprehensive CSR policy under the banner of ‘citizenship’. By some comparative measures it was doing well with regards volunteering hours and environmental impact. But this strand of corporate citizenship cannot discount wrongdoing in another domain – its primary domain, its professional core – that has caused unnecessary losses in the wider society.

A lack of clarity about our spheres of responsibility makes it harder to ascertain when someone has been negligent. In a modern world where individual decisions can have complex—sometimes worldwide– impacts, it is increasingly difficult to decide what we should hold each other accountable for. This makes it easier to take actions which, if we were forced to account for, might be hard to justify. Dan Ariely’s recently published The Honest Truth About Dishonesty offers a comprehensive take on our capacity for self-deception and the extent to which dishonesty is rationalized away at the personal level. There is an interesting side consideration here about the impact of bringing all these tendencies to our attention: I always wonder whether the behavioral psychology of ‘irrationality’ only gives us another tool with which to placate our conscience – it’s okay, everybody suffers from ethical fading.  As Ariely has explained in press interviews, the response to this heightened awareness must be to put more effort into reminding ourselves of moral responsibility.

To be responsible has two sets of connotations: on the one hand responsibility is a burden, a weight that we bear more or less reluctantly. Yet on the other it is a mark of adulthood. To be responsible is to be mature, trusted. It may be that foreseeing the consequences of our actions in the modern, complex world is in many cases beyond our cognitive powers. If, to use a phrase of psychologst Robert Kegan’s, we are ‘in over our heads’, how should we think about responsibility?

To start with, we must think differently about risk when others would lose from a bad outcome. Secondly, lack of foresight can no longer be a blanket excuse: the default must be that organisations are responsible for indirect as well as direct effects. Lastly, as far as possible specific individuals should held accountable for the outcomes of specifically theiractions. As we understand more and more about our behavior as social animals, we hold onto the notion of individual responsibility by a thread. We cannot afford to lose it—indeed we must strengthen this fiber and make it a seamless part of our working lives.

Towards a Quality Course

by Lynn Barendsen

At our annual Project Zero Summer Institute, we taught a new course called Quality: Does it Matter? For the past five years, with generous funding from Faber Castell, a company that shares our own GoodWork values, we have been studying the topic of quality—how people define and understand quality, how they make decisions and judgments about quality, and how perceptions of quality change over time, due to life changes as well as societal changes, including the influx of new technologies. We have wondered how quality relates to GoodWork (certainly we hope that individuals strive to do excellent, high quality work) and how aiming for quality in work and other realms helps individuals to lead and live a “quality life.”  This study of quality is one of many related topics of research:  in addition to good work, our team has been investigating good play, good citizenship, and the elements necessary to a good life.

After completing an in-depth study of individuals in the United States, we also surveyed 5000 other individuals around the world, including Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Indonesia. We are about to launch the survey in Turkey. We decided to teach a “minicourse” at this summer’s Institute because we believe that many of our findings are relevant to teaching and learning in the 21st century.

The goals of the course were for participants to explore their own definitions of “quality” and to unpack what this term really means to them personally and professionally. Interestingly, throughout the course, we validated many of the findings from individuals all around the world—quality is most important in terms of time, and decisions about how to use time wisely (rather than to waste it, or just let it pass) is paramount. Spending time with family and friends—being around those who you care about—is much more important than spending time on the computer or running errands. With this in mind, we asked participants about how we can ensure that students experience “quality” learning and teaching in school, and asked them as well to think further about how they define “quality” learning and teaching.

As part of our course, participants worked with a book we have written (currently unpublished) called Quality Through the Ages. The book is a compilation of 45 examples of quality over time—spanning some of the earliest inventions (e.g. clay and painting) to modern day monuments, professions, and other examples and spheres of quality (e.g. Shakespeare, tracking of time, the Internet). All of the participants read a short essay discussing the Olympics. We chose this essay because we thought that it brought up interesting issues for teachers and because it was timely. Please click here to read this example (link).

Indeed, the essay about the Olympics raised many important issues for teachers, even more than we had anticipated (no doubt the fact that the 2012 Olympics had just begun in London had a priming effect!). As we moved from table to table, we heard many important points including:

– How is quality really judged? How do we judge the level of quality work in the classroom? Do students feel that we judge work in objective ways, or is  the process necessarily more subjective?

– How far can we (or should we) push students to produce high quality work? Just as some athletes are pushed too far, should we be expecting perfection from our students?

– Some Olympian athletes are motivated to win and compete for intrinsic reasons (e.g. personal satisfaction) rather than some “professional” athletes who like to compete and win for money. How does this apply to students? How can we encourage kids to work hard for intrinsic reasons (rather than extrinsic purposes, e.g. winning awards, getting high scores and GPAs)?

-How do we know when our standards of quality are unrealistic?  Is quality dependent upon the values we bring to the table?

-Time (a constant theme in our research) can determine who wins (e.g. who is the fastest runner) or who is the most prepared (who has put in the most time in training).  In the classroom, knowing how to judge time is a crucial skill students need to learn.  When is a paper “done”?  When is it time to move on to the next assignment?

In addition to the discussion of this vignette, a few other interesting “findings” emerged from the course. Specifically, participants seemed guarded about discussing traits or markers of a “quality student.” This came up at the end of the course, when we asked participants to roam the room and write thoughts about a variety of categories, including “quality student,” “quality teaching,” and “relationship of quality and balance.” Some teachers were offended by having to describe or define a quality student, yet they did not have the same reaction to being asked to describe quality teaching. Were teachers being defensive about their students? Their craft? Or, if we had asked about a “quality teacher,” would we have had the same reaction? Furthermore, the relationship of quality and balance proved a very useful concept for teachers. Balance related to many aspects of the course—how to strive for quality work and at the same time keep balance in our personal lives, how to balance the double-edged sword of technology use (it helps people be more efficient, but is also labeled as a waste of time), and how to encourage deep passion and “flow” in work, but not lose sight of the ultimate goal.

In sum, we were pleased that the topics and our research findings resonated with participants. Quality is very much at the center of GoodWork, and indeed, many of the sentiments shared throughout the course could have been articulated at the Toolkit minicourse that we’ve offered for several years.  As a result of this course, we have begun to think about ways to adapt Quality Through the Ages into a Quality Toolkit or to infuse it into our current GoodWork Toolkit…so stay tuned!