By Tim Moore

 

In the two-thousands the hue and cry over ethics has risen with the wind. Author John Maxwell was having dinner with Larry Kirshbaum, CEO for Time Warner Books. Kirshbaum had an inspiration: "John how about writing a book on business ethics?" Maxwell's retort blindsided his colleague. "There's no such thing as business ethics, there's only ethics."
 
An ethical dilemma can be defined as an undesirable or unpleasant choice relating to a moral principle or practice.  America is not grading itself very well. Pollster George Barna asked people whether they had "complete confidence" that their leaders from various professions "would consistently make job-related decisions that are morally appropriate." The results were abysmal. Confidence in executives of large corporations confidence totaled 3% and equaled the same for elected government officials (3%). This may be why congressional approval ratings have sunk from obscurity into oblivion. News reporters and journalists faired marginally better at 5% in the 'complete confidence' rating while clergy and educators scored but 11 and 14 percent respectively.
 
Perhaps we've reached critical mass where disgust is turning into discussion. In and out of media, people at all levels are asking why ethics are frayed at the edges and stretched to the extremes?
It's helpful to contemplate rare contemporaries who, even through their opponents' eyes, scored far above the norm for best practices and ethics. Consider for example, Margaret Thatcher.
 
Her Downing Street years profiled a person with a riveting perception of events and their implications: The Falklands War, the Miners' Strike or the Brighton Bomb as examples. She battled abroad with foreign federalists and at home with faint-hearted and misguided ministers. Her appraisal of the men and women in her cabinet and world statesmen was brutally frank; lavish with praise where due, devastating in her criticism when it was not. Perhaps the key to resolution for much of our current ethical dilemma can be reduced to one of Thatcher's core principles: My government was about the application of a philosophy, not just the implementation of an administrative agenda.
 
Effective leadership, ethical leadership, comes from a bedrock commitment to doing the right thing when resisting the "twins" of ethical declivity, hubris and timidity. Once a great leader begins to follow a train of thought, they're not easily stopped, since there's no turning back from a moving train. Perhaps so many others fear ethics as a primary filter because they believe that embracing ethics in business or politics limits their options, their range of opportunity, and even their very chance to succeed.
 
In theory, if we could turn back the calendar a dozen years to reallocate major research dollars toward the behavior of leaders and their value of ethical leadership, we'd be in a better place today. Alas, dollars can't buy back yesterday.
  
John Maxwell offers the thought that in the end, there are two basic paths to achievement from which we can choose. We can go for the gold, or we can go for the Golden Rule. There is no traffic jam on the "extra mile."