Hi Pete, Once again (in your para below) I think you're generalising too much in attributing widescale moral turpitude to an "entire corporate culture".
In real life, these situations happen all too often -- and in *all* sorts of organisations, not just businesses. It requires an extraordinary degree of courage to whistleblow on one's superiors in an organisation. It's part of our deeply tribal nature, I suppose, but the fact of life is that whistleblowing occurs very rarely indeed. And, when it does happen, the whistleblower almost invariably comes out of it very badly. (One unusual aspect of the Sherron Watkins case at Enron is that she didn't lose her job after she'd written to Kenneth Lay.) Let me tell a shocking story concerning many scores of child deaths in a hospital not far from here. (It involves a public service hospital but I'm not attributing this affair to the failings of the National Health Service -- it could have happened in a private hospital.) For something like 12-15 years, the death rate in a specialist children's surgical unit at a Bristol hospital was something like three to four times higher than those of other children's specialist units around the country. Unless someone in the hospital kept records then, over the period of years (involving 200 or 300 operations altogether), no-one would have realised this -- except officials at a very high level in the Ministry of Health (who had access to records from all such units around the country) or among the professionals themselves at the different units (consultants at Royal College level). Mind you, this was probably a few hundred people altogether. The high death rate was due entirely to two surgeons who badly advised parents, chose inappropriate operations and subsequently performed them badly. Finally, after collecting careful records for several years and careful matching of operations, a concerned anaesthetist (who'd attended many of the operations), blew the whistle -- initially within the Royal Colleges then, when nothing happened, at the Ministry of Health then, when nothing happened, more widely. It finally percolated through to the public and, in particular, to the parents of the children concerned -- and then the balloon finally went up. How serious all this was it was can be ascertained from the final result -- taking three or four years to work its way through -- which was the sacking of the two surgeons concerned, massive publicity and perhaps the biggest-ever overhaul of the profession. (And also, incidentally, public accessibility to hospital data.) However, in the meantime it also caused the whistleblower to lose his job and, although he was a highly qualified consultant, he was unable to get another job at *any* hospital in this country. The Royal Colleges ganged up on him. He was only able to resume his profession in a country which has a healthy distaste for the sort of class structure and establishment control which disfigures this country -- namely, Australia. He is now once again a practising consultant and subsequently a university professor. This happens time and time again to whistleblowers. I can think of no case when a whistleblower has not been severely mauled and damaged for doing so, even if the concern was raised in the public interest. Several hundred people at Enron must have known that something fishy was going on but most of them would only have had a partial view. The degree to which these people carry a moral responsibility can only be a graded one, rising step by step up the hierarchy as their purview expands. There were probably several dozen others at Sherron Watkins' level at Enron. I still think she should be praised for her courage even though she didn't take the final step of approaching the regulatory authorities. Another executive, you'll recall, committed suicide because of the stress. I would like to see the public stocks brought back for people like Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, such is the immorality of what they were doing. But the burying of heads in the sand by people in large hierarchical organisations is a pretty universal trait in human nature, I'm afraid. Think, for a moment, of the number of people involved in running the Jewish death camps in wartime Germany. There should have been many whistleblowers there, too. Keith At 20:01 28/02/02 -0800, you wrote: (PW) <<<< I agree entirely, I don't mean to say no one in business has ethics, only that it seems to me a matter of degree, that a threshhold has been crossed where such behaviour is now within the realm of consideration. It seems to me that with Enron we aren't talking about one or two people embezzling in secret, but the entire corporate culture, a large number of people in the executive levels of a multi-billion dollar enterprise, either actively colluding, or passively tolerating ethical bankruptcy. Is it really likely that all the moral turpitude in american executive circles just happened to coalesce in this one edifice, or are we more likely just viewing the tip of the iceberg? >>>> __________________________________________________________ “Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.” John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
