You, me and the human corporation

Let's talk about corporate ethics, okay?

It's a delightful subject and you're going to love it, I assure you. Didn't you also love those canned lima beans your mother once served you while smiling cheerfully, as if she liked them, too?

This will go down even easier than canned lima beans. Corporate ethics are often so narrowly defined by corporate managers that there's little to talk about. It'll all be over quickly, I promise.

As you may have noticed, a corporate manager's ethics often rise at least to the level of a cannibal's - a creature capable of working together with others, accomplishing predatory goals, and consuming fellow humans, if necessary or desirable.

Of course, those who help manage corporations in Florida, where cannibalism is illegal, are probably not cannibals, no matter how much they might resemble them.

For our managers here, unlike for other creatures incorporated in nature - hyenas or rattlesnakes or weasels or (arguably) cannibals - each individual gets to decide how she or he is going to behave, both in and out of a legal corporation. And that is a huge opportunity.

It is also the same opportunity, whether in or out of a corporation - whether during the 9 to 5, or after the 9 to 5. (In Florida, there are 883,563 domestic for-profit corporations, 128,441 domestic non-profits, and 391,293 limited liability companies, among others, according to the state Division of Corporations.)

That said, let me ask a simple question: Why should corporate ethics be any different than any other ethics? There's a simple answer: They shouldn't, since corporations are really just individuals - men and women - who decide to behave in a certain way toward other men and women.

One does not surrender one set of ethics for another at the door of a corporation, where some people are getting rich and the rest are helping them do it in order to survive. Not unless one is corrupt, and a coward.

However inconvenient for you if you work for a corporation, therefore, corporate life is always a test of personal morals. It can also be a chance to earn money and security, and maybe even to do some good and to have some fun, on occasion. But since the test is always there, corporate life is always hard, probably harder than it looks from the outside.

Even when it appears easy, even when the money's good, and the managers are smiling, and the praise appears to be forthcoming because the evaluations are upbeat, the test is waiting there ready to surprise you, to hold an unwavering mirror up to your character.

To help managers, in particular, avoid the specter of the omnipresent moral test, the corporation asserts aggressively (in the great tradition of Pontius Pilate) that corporate life is different than other life. "It's not personal, it's just business," the mantra goes. "Don't take it personally."

But all ethics are personal, as everybody knows, and the first and greatest lie of corporate life is that single sophistry: It's not personal.

In fact, everything you do each day is personal, because it affects someone else. John Donne knew this in the London of four centuries ago: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent," he explained.

So, every single thing you say about someone else, whether true or not - every action you take, every memo or letter you write, every conversation you carry on with a higher-up, a lower-down, a mentor or a peer - all of it's personal. It's a personal test of you, and it's a personal action toward another (in a corporation, oddly enough, words are always actions and thus deeds, whether written or spoken).

That's the nature of human life and society, of corporations, and only dishonest or very stupid people deny it.

So how do corporations start, or carry on? Always with one person. One person embarks on a working life, and one person decides how she or he is going to treat, or mistreat, others in the course of getting ahead. In that decision is revealed character: heart and mind, personal history and evolution, temperament.

In corporate life, nothing is truer than this: that the state is the soul writ large, as Plato said. So in the decision of one person, or the conversation of two about a third, the character of the corporation is always revealed. It's your character; it's theirs.

The word corporate, by the way, comes from the Latin, corpora, meaning the body. And the question on the minds of many Americans who work in a corporate body is very simple: How are the managers going to treat me?

The top managers are people the middle managers want to be. All of them have different (much higher) salary schedules, they're privy to a variety of information other workers are not, and they're capable of whimsically altering the lives of those less powerful or less ambitious within the corporation.

And so, their ethics are particularly important, especially in a right-to-work state such as Florida (right-to-work is a misnomer; the term only defines an environment in which managers have the right to fire employees without reason, notice or liability. Thus, here, corporations are legally justified dictatorships, some relatively benign, and others decidedly not).

Periodically, great managers will appear, those whose ethics are both humane and pragmatic; they are honorable people, to use a weathered but still-serviceable label. They look to both mission and troop welfare (so to speak) as two sides of the same coin, which means they will ferociously defend talent, diversity of style and temperament, and the wide variety of personalities they lead. They will also promote the welfare of their people all the time, because this will improve their chances of accomplishing the mission.

They tend to inspire long-term loyalty, passionate enterprise, and independent thinking and operating on the part of employees. Under such leaders, meritocracies are more likely to evolve.

Then there are all the other managers, who become adept at by-the-book leadership, at coining and exercising the clichés of management. They attend leadership seminars and file detailed and frequent management reports and employee evaluations. They follow carefully and rigorously programmed guidelines for leadership established by corporate attorneys and other managers to whom they must appeal. They do plans by committee, they make lists by the score, and they carry all the tools of great leaders, in the same way that bad carpenters carry all the tools of good carpenters.

Finally, these mediocrities view the art of leadership as the art of manipulation - manipulation of other men and women who must do their bidding in the name of the corporation.

Even if some employees have more talent, brains, ability and common decency than the managers themselves, their characters shape the outcomes of many other lives, and they define the corporation.

So what do you do if you're a manager, or aspire to being one?

The same thing you do if you aren't, and don't: You get up tomorrow, and you decide what deeds you'll inscribe on a life - your life, and thus other lives - and you go inscribe them.

Just don't pretend it's not personal.