Cesspits of bad behavior
by Tom Sullivan
In business today, too often integrity is an afterthought.
The San Francisco Chronicle quotes from the blog, Both Sides of the Table, by investor Mark Suster, "I believe that integrity and honesty are very important to most venture capital investors. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that they are required to make a lot of money."
In a piece that might be titled, "The Real Jerks of Silicon Valley," Alyson Shontell examines how many rising stars in Silicon Valley tend to be "--holes". (The construction pops up frequently in the piece.) The rogues gallery is expansive, including Uber's Travis Kalanick. He's had a particularly bad week. Still,
"Sometimes," one acquaintance said of Kalanick, "--holes create great businesses."
What's remarkable is how acceptable this has become, even expected. Shontell quotes Atlantic's Tom McNichol:
The ease with which people can possess astonishingly contradictory qualities is one of the mysteries of human nature; indeed, it's one of the things that separates humans from, say, an Apple computer. Every one of the components that makes up an iPad is essential to the work it produces. Remove one part and the machine no longer performs its job, and not even the Genius Bar can fix it. But humans are full of qualities that are in no way integral to their functioning in the world. Some aspects of personality have little or no bearing on whether a person performs well, and not a few people succeed in spite of their darker qualities.
Andre Spicer at the Washington Post observes the same on Wall Street:
There is something in the culture of banking that lends itself toward making otherwise fairly good people do bad things. That’s the finding of a new study published in the journal, Nature. And it may simply confirm the suspicions of many following endless news of bankers being outed for bad behaviour.
Economists at the University of Zurich, Michel Maréchal, Alain Cohn and Ernst Fehr found that bankers are more likely to lie and cheat when primed to think of themselves as bankers than as "everyday people". Members of other professions did not exhibit the same bad behavior. There's something wrapped up in the banker identity that makes them "such cesspits of bad behavior."
Cheating was also not simply the result of people thinking that everyone else was doing it and so it was OK. What seemed to prompt bankers to cheat on this test was when they thought of themselves as bankers.
What is more, it is not just that people who identify as bankers tend to lie and cheat more than the general population. In fact, the study showed that this behavior was expected of them by others. This can be seen when participants were asked how often they thought bankers would cheat on this test (when compared to other interest groups). Respondents tended to think that bankers would cheat more than prison inmates on the test. This says something for what expect of the people we trust with our money.
In the end, says Spicer, changing the perception of what it means to be a banker might be required:
... Things like “Greed is good” and associations with winning at any cost might be downplayed. Other characteristics, such as being trustworthy and having integrity could be played up. Over time this would hopefully lead to bankers thinking about their collective identity in a different way. And the result would, hopefully, be that when they are faced with a situation where no one is looking, they do the right thing — like the rest of the population usually does.
Pie in the sky. Hopefully, right (twice). When the financial incentives are so high — in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in corporate boardrooms elsewhere — enforcement lax to nonexistent, and punishments limited to slap-on-the-wrist fines for the company and not individuals, who is going to play up trustworthiness and integrity?
When the country can be suckered into chasing phantom felons at the ballot box (a high risk, low reward crime) while firms and CEOs who took the world to the brink of collapse defraud homeowners, investors, and courts get bailouts and walk, and with Congress controlled by "a weird amalgam of straight up feudalists and insane libertarians," don't hold your breath for a cultural Road to Damascus experience anytime soon.