Pete On Rails

I just finished a class in business school about managing technology and innovation. Though we studied a lot of interesting management theories and creative companies, the most fascinating and curious aspect of managing modern innovation is the ethical dimension. This topic is particularly relevant given many of todays conundrums in areas such as biotechnology, stem cell research, climate change, and data mining.

Primarily, ethicists give us two frameworks to use in evaluating ethical dilemmas: teleological and deontological. The teleological framework is a utilitarian point of view. The ends justify the means. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. On the other hand, deontological analysis is the opposite. That is, we must alway conduct ourselves according to certain moral standards, regardless of the outcome. Put another way, it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. The difference between the teleological and deontological methods of ethical analysis rationalizes decisions into two distinct camps. To what extent, however, do innovative organizations fall into one camp or the other? I think they are driven by a blend of both, but with emphasis on the deontological.

Consider the innovative and wildly successful firm IDEO (http://www.ideo.com). This company is an example of one of the most exciting places to work today. If you saw the Nightline documentary on this company, you know that they place an amazing amount of power and emphasis on their people. You also know that their employees are among the best and brightest in the nation. For example, one product specialist has deferred entry to Harvard medical school for three years now because he’s having too much fun. Clearly, the way IDEO plays the game has a lot to do with their results. They’re winners.

I know of another technology firm that prides itself on the way it wins the game. The company values its people, making only those hires that are strategically relevant to the company. They turn down more business than they take because they want only the best people. Ramping up too fast introduces junk into the human capital pool. This company has amassed enough capital in reserve to survive a full year with no customers without cutting staff, and have articulated this as a core value of the organization. The core values of this organization are deontological in nature. It is not unheard of for people to suggest that the profits from a new product be donated to charity because the employee who had the idea for the product thought that was important.

As long as certain basic financial targets are met, it’s pretty easy to be all about the means to the end. This demonstrates the balance between the teleological and deontological. As long as we have a justifiable end, the means ought to be as morally bright as possible.

The most relevant deontological litmus test is the ever relevant Universalization Test. When making a decision, the deontologist must ask: “What if everyone else in the world made this same choice? Would the world be a better place? Would I want to live in it?” If the answer is bleak, then the choice might not be so good.

There is another dimension of ethics worth exploring, though it is related more to management than innovation. Too often today, it seems that rather than applying the universalization test to ethics questions, organizations instead ask themselves the media question. That is, “What would happen if the media found out we made this decision based on these criteria?” If we apply that ethical question test face value, perhaps we come up with such an answer as, “we’d be embarrassed, so we ought not do that.” Unfortunately, many organizations take this question as a starting point for scenario building and risk mitigation. This shows a bias in favor of the teleological, end-justify-the-means approach that is often found among the large organizations that have been wrought by scandal lately. To be certain, many of those organizations were being creative. But is it innovative to find a way around the norms and values of our culture to profit? Or does innovation demand that we play within a set of moral standards?

Therein lies to dilemma when we think about stem cells. There are certainly more than two sides to the issue. There are a lot of folks who believe we ought to be doing stem cell research. I happen to be one of those people. There are some other people, many of them democratic congressmen, who think that we ought to hold off on certain types of stem cell research because it isn’t safe. That’s a teleological point of view, and it’s certainly valid. Then, of course, you have the deontological position, which many people will equate with the Bush administration’s stance on the topic. The ultimate premise of the deontological position is, “It is not right to take one life in order to preserve another life.” That’s certainly a difficult assertion to argue with as a matter of policy. Given that the Bush adminstration has a very strong position on when life begins, their conclusions certainly make sendse.

But there are two tough questions that are raised by that position. First, when does life really begin. Is it at the time an egg is fertilized? Is it at quickening? Birth? Or at some nebulous biological milestone in between? My gut tells me it’s the last one. If you think it’s the first one, then you are certainly justified in opposing stem cell research. The even tougher question in my mind, though, is this: If it is NOT OK to take one life to save another, if life begins at egg fertilization, and if we must ban new stem cell lines from being created based on this moral code that we adhere to, then why is it OK to experiment on the existing lines of stem cells? Are those lives a sunk cost? Is it OK to benefit from what would have been a moral outrage simply because the damage is done?

When we make decisions about innovation based on moral standards, such as in the stem cell debate, whose ethical norms should we follow? One of the major problems with ethics in high technology is that the general public is easily swayed one way or another on topics that they know very little about. If you ask the average American about embryonic stem cell research, they are sure to have what they believe to be an informed opinion. If you ask those same individuals to draw an embryo, I suspect that more than 75% of them will draw you a fetus. That is, something that looks like a tiny, developing person with a brain, heart, lungs, and presumably consciousness. The debate over whether life begins at quickening, implantation, conception, birth, or some biological development milestone along the way is irrelevant if the people debating the issue don’t understand the basic biological process of reproduction. This topic leaves me with more questions to ponder than answers.

How do we equip ourselves to innovate, then, within the context of our cultural and ethical norms? How do we educate the public about the true nature of what we are trying to do? Is it possible to rationalize every decision we make with respect to innovation, or are some areas of research just not ethically viable? Certainly we have made mistakes. Nuclear energy is a good thing in my book, but nuclear weapons are an unconscionable legacy for which we will all have to pay someday. Would it have been possible to have one without the other, given the diversity in moral values throughout the world? If the United States had not developed and used nuclear weapons, but only nuclear energy, wouldn’t someone else in the world have created the atomic bomb? Would it have been moral not to develop the technology to deter others from using it? Is it moral that we killed so many people in Japan to demonstrate why nuclear weapons are such a bad idea?

I think the answer to these ethical questions lie in a gray area. They are murky, to be sure. The traditional ethical frameworks don’t always apply when we talk about innovation. But to be sure, it helps to go through each method of analysis in order to have a more informed view of the issues. Perhaps Virtue Ethics has the answer. I certainly don’t.