Managing Leadership^®

One of the problems with discussing values in the workplace is that so many people think the whole subject is simple nonsense. Work is about work, they argue: do your charity at home.

At best, they tolerate it as a fad, like vision statements. Great pronouncements are developed - usually by external consultants. But everyone knows that they will then be posted in the lobby to quickly fade unnoticed and forgotten into the background while people get on with real work and real goals.

Consider again the fate of our poor friend, Don Quixote, as portrayed in The Man of La Mancha. Recall that he went mad, and in his madness saw virtue where others knew there was only vice, and strove to do good in a world where men no longer troubled to defend the right.

As a result, a doctor determined to cure him. A reluctant accomplice, of two minds about the gravity of the illness and the grandeur of its expression, mused that perhaps Quixote was either the world’s wisest madman, or its maddest wise man. The doctor, the objective expert, replied with a confidence uncomplicated by philosophical drivel: “He is mad.”

And, indeed, in the self-defining clear-headed, bottom-line calculations of no-nonsense business realists, that is often the diagnosis of those who seek to introduce alien notions into the pristine, undiluted purity of what they imagine to be management science. For all of today’s talk of values, stakeholder interests, and social responsibility, there are those who continue to find it all, actually, a dangerous assault on the one realm still largely untainted with ideological strife.

And, in fact, there is something to said for that argument. The problem is that it, itself, constitutes a business ethic that will inform the culture of an organization just as surely as any more frankly addressed and considered value set.

So, then, it may very well be that there is no escaping the issue, after all. Perhaps the nature of the real world - including the work world - is that it will ultimately reveal all of us to be either wise madmen or mad wise men.

Which will it be for you?

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Tomorrow, we’ll be talking about books. But you shouldn’t even dream that we’ve exhausted the current topic quite yet. Please be sure to stop by to see what’s next.

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Today’s Tip: Speaking of inadvertent revelation of individual and organizational values - even possibly self-destructive ones - please see this discussion of women in the boardroom, by Sheli Rosenberg in Business Week.

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