Ferengi Nation

I've jumped to a conclusion: A person who tries to operate with integrity, placing honesty, good faith and fairness above profit is doomed in the modern American workplace.

This has weighed on me a bit, in my meditations looking back on my working life. As many of you know, I have spent much of the last 30 months without an income, and despite the dismissal of sane people everywhere, I'm still fairly convinced that a contributing factor to my continued employment status is because I made a mistake. I made the mistake of not lying; of not facilitating theft; and when retaliation came for not being "a team player," I made the mistake of not staying quiet about the whole thing. And, perhaps the biggest mistake of all? I resigned, rather than being placed in a paid state of limbo, where I may have been allowed to stay a while longer, but would never be given meaningful work, ever again.

I've worked at two Fortune 100 companies; what I outline above happened at the first one I worked for -- a job I was in for nearly seven years. In that time, I nearly doubled my salary, received two promotions and was known throughout the organization as a "go-to guy" on several mission-critical tasks. I gave presentations to the board; nearly all of the senior executives knew me by name. I was not even a member of management.

I was there when scandal struck the company -- I had the great, good fortune of having the same first name, and similar last name, of the exec in charge of corporate PR. I may have been the first person at HQ to know when one of our facilities was raided by federal authorities, because the switchboard forwarded the NYT reporter covering the developments to my voicemail, by mistake. This scandal took a few years to play out, but resulted in the largest ever fraud settlement to the USDOJ -- over $1 billion. Yep, billion, with a "B."

I had nothing to do with the scandal, itself -- had no knowlege of it, no understanding of it (at least as it was actually happening), nor did I play even an unwitting part in it. Still, when the final tab ends up topping $1 billion, you'd think that might rock the ship-of-state, in general. To be sure, heads did roll, but no one remotely close to my turf. The day the settlement was announced, the company's stock went up. And kept going up. If anything, the company's approach to its employees became even friendlier, more open, and more genuine. There was an air of "getting this behind us/bad apples, etc."

Enter nineteen hijackers, and a resultant economic slowdown. Gone were the days where guys like me could go to lunch, and after dessert and a handshake, have a brand new job, paying 15-20% more that what we were currently making. The rules changed. Critical remarks that were once welcomed in staff meetings were now shouted down. The culture evolved into one where the word "no" did not exist. Demands on employees became more unreasonable, petty and in some cases, frankly absurd. Finally, the requests I were given were unethical at best, larcenous at worst. I drew my line, and as I said, I paid for it.

The second, more recent Fortune 100 job -- the integrity issue was not as pronounced. An example: I was told to tell my customers that I owned whatever product the customer was interested in purchasing. Another: I was told that our technical support for our premium product line was U.S.-based -- not true for my customers -- only for business clients (to whom I could not sell anything, anyway).

I was raised to believe that hard work and honesty were two qualities that would always be prized and rewarded, but if I were raising children today, wouldn't it be negligent of me to explain to them the other side of that coin? That one must be prepared to turn a blind eye to cooked books, or outright theft?

So, now, a question: What's the biggest ethical issue you've encountered in your employment history? Did you stay? If not, were you pushed, or did you jump?
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