Every day you have decisions to make. Often those decisions are easy. When the choice to do the right thing is also the profitable choice, it’s easy to choose. But lots of decisions aren’t like that. For most decisions, there are two choices: For example: If you’ve got a mortgage to pay, a kid who…
Google used to embrace the principle “Don’t be evil.” Even if that’s no longer central to their way of doing business, it should be to yours. As a freelancer, you might be asked to do anything. And as an employee, you might face difficult ethical choices. In the back of your mind is a thing…
You have a conscience. You know what the right thing to do is. But the right thing is going to cost you. Do you still do the right thing? Today I’m going to tell you how doing the right thing paid off for me in unexpected ways. Because it turns out that people notice integrity,…
ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism site, obtained and then published details of the tax returns of billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, and Michael Bloomberg. Their reporting echoed across the internet, but did it really justify stealing people’s private information? “ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the…
I’ve faced many ethics quandaries in my long career. You will, too. Everyone believes they are ethical. But when it’s time to decide, what will you actually do? Real-life ethics test Here’s a list of ethical situations, most of which I actually faced. Put yourself in my shoes. What would you do? In the interest…
What does it feel like to file a complaint that something’s just not right and watch the process unfold? What’s happening right now in DC is unprecedented, and the stakes and risks for the person who filed the whistleblower complaint are very high. The person who reported on Trump’s activities in the call with Ukraine…
As I watch people endorsing their friends’ books that they haven’t read, I keep getting reminded of a question that is nagging at the back of my mind. Which is more important, integrity or friendship? If you are an analytical thinker or hope to be a thought leader, this is not an idle question. An…
Is it wrong to write a paper for a student? This seems like a black-and-white ethical issue, but having now seen some comments from people with a very different cultural perspective, I’m trying to think about it more carefully. This occurred to me when I saw that the Pakistani tech journalist and entrepreneur Hira Saeed,…
House Republicans voted to rejigger (or as the headlines put it, “gut“) their independent ethics office; then, after heavy criticism from Democrats, Trump, and voters, said, “Nah, forget it.” What were they thinking? To find out, I analyzed a statement from Virginia Representative Bob Goodlatte, point man for the change. He’s mastered the Orwellian skill of calling…