Edging Toward Nobility.

• Author: Gilbert, Christopher
• Position: BY THE BOOK

"You probably already are familiar with the competitive edge, the cutting edge, and the leading edge"--but what about the noble edge? THERE IS NO right way to do the wrong thing. We spend our lives bumping up against the lessons in those words. Corporate executives of multibillion-dollar companies who once made multimillion-dollar salaries are spending prison time with those words. Hollywood moguls and powerful politicians have been retired by those words. Spiritual leaders have been defrocked ignoring those words.

Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, educators, community leaders, sports and entertainment stars, you, me, our children--no one escapes them. They are simple and essential. They are the quality we make of our lives--and they are needed now, more than ever.

After the last several years, we all need an ethics refresh. The key is knowing what it means to do right in business and in life despite the constant personal, social, economic, and other cultural and societal pressures to ignore what is "right" in favor of "success." Face it: our world rewards individual initiative and holds in high esteem a winner defined largely by bis or her tide, possessions, and popularity--not very solid footing for consistent ethical choice-making.

Frankly, most of us have the "ethics-out-of-body experience." We seem to believe that, while we read about those awful and evil people who make unethical decisions to defraud the unaware, we ourselves never would make the same bad choices.

Research tells us that unethical choices, be they small or large, often are made with the firm belief they are good decisions. Poor choices, even illegal ones at times, are rationalized and supported by some belief that ultimately justifies them as best--even when others may get hurt in the process.

There seems to be little incongruity in our minds about our own ethical infallibility. Everyday actions by good people--such as cutting someone off on the highway, adding a bit of gold leaf to a resume, illegal downloads on the Internet, fudging here and there on taxes, taking credit for others' work, etc.--easily are rationalized. Yet, the way most of us decide to make these "little" choices is the same way high-profilers can decide to make the big, bad choices.

This is the ethics-out-of-body experience--judging others with a different set of lenses than we use to judge ourselves. It is the common act of standing apart from our own ability to make bad choices we rationalize even as we read about the bad choice-makers caught in public scandals who do exactly the same thing, only on a larger scale.

It is not the size of the bad action that makes it unethical. Large or small, negative outcomes caused by unethical...