3 Takeaways - Complicit: When Good People Turn a Blind Eye to Rape, Thievery, and Fraud. With Harvard’s Max Bazerman (#118)

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

Countless people knew what Harvey Weinstein, Elizabeth Holmes, and the Catholic Church were doing – but remained silent. Why do good people allow the horrific behavior of others?  Harvard professor Max Bazerman explores this complicity and offers solutions.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be with Harvard Business School Professor Max Bazerman. Max is the author of the new book, Complicit.

I'm excited to learn more about how perfectly nice people end up being complicit in horrendous wrongdoing. Welcome, Max, and thanks so much for our conversation today. Lynn, thank you for inviting me on to your podcast. I'm delighted to be talking with you today. It is my pleasure. Let's start by talking about some examples of wrongdoing, and then after that, we can explore the reasons that people enabled it. Can you tell us about Harvey Weinstein, what he did, and who knew about it and enabled it? Harvey Weinstein is like so many other prestigious people who have ended up being abusers, where their actions were terrible,

and the media focuses on the specific actor that caused this harm, and that's completely justifiable. But for me, one of the fascinating aspects of Weinstein and others are all the people around them who allowed the harm to occur, from the employees who knew what was going on and actually facilitated Weinstein doing this damage to producers and distributors who basically went along with the harm that he was creating. Actually, I just finished a novel by Winnie Lee, also called Complicit, same title as my book. And this is a woman who had worked in the industry, but now wrote a novel.

And she's clearly portraying herself as the core character in her novel. And she highlights the way in which she becomes complicit in the harm by this harasser and rapist also in the media world, which has a number of parallels to Weinstein. And when we read the amazing accounts of Weinstein by people like Ken Auletta and Ronan Farrow and a duo from the New York Times, we just come across the fact that it wasn't a small number of people who allowed Weinstein to get away with repeated rapes. But in fact, it was a large number of people who simply didn't speak out and continued to create this harm by bringing Weinstein young women who would be in a very, very difficult situation where they felt that their careers

were on the line and were speaking out, felt like it could end their career. So we see this facilitation pattern. And what's fascinating about the Weinstein story is if we move away from sexual assault to lots of other domains of wrongdoing, we similarly see this pattern of people around the wrongdoer too often allowing the harm to occur. And in Weinstein's case, his assistants and employees and other people were scheduling appointments, meetings, women thought, with Weinstein late at night where they were the only person or in his hotel rooms. Exactly. So he commonly had meetings in his hotel rooms, which created the opportunity

for assault to occur. There were employees who repeatedly brought lots of young women to his hotel room who would leave crying, and too few people spoke up. Undoubtedly, there are people who had concerns who didn't facilitate the harm, but years went by without anybody speaking out in a meaningful way. And you just mentioned that people would see these women leaving crying when they left. Correct. And again, this isn't my reporting, kind of re-reporting the work of others. How about the case of Elizabeth Holmes and her company, Theranos? Theranos, yeah.

Yeah, so fascinating story. We read lots about Elizabeth Holmes, and we see many series, we've read books about her claims to be able to create 200 different blood tests on a simple machine. And we now know that the claims were very fraudulent. And she was repeatedly lying to investors, to the government, to the military, and to Walgreens pharmacies who basically put her technology in their stores. And much of what we read focuses on Elizabeth Holmes herself, but she clearly had a partner, Sunny Balwani, who was both her romantic partner and the president of Theranos, who was working in collaboration with her on the fraud.

But beyond the two of them, we also can look at the board of directors filled with very famous people who sat around a table, not observing the fact that none of them seemed to have any technical expertise relevant to what the company was about. None of them asked the probing questions. Everybody was taken in by this kind of visionary leader who was basically lying to them on a continuing basis. But it's not just the board. It was also many employees who didn't speak up out of fear for their job and careers in lawsuits. And I think one of the amazing stories is Walgreens, who hired their own consultant to do validation work on the Theranos technology. The consultant basically told them, this is not to be trusted.

They won't give us the critical data. would buy the technology instead of Walgreens, basically ignores lots of warning signals and brings these devices into Walgreens stores, testing actual patients, providing misdiagnoses because they failed to do the due diligence necessary. So all around Elizabeth Holmes are people who have a moral obligation to make sure that they're acting in a credible way, but in fact are lured in by this pseudo visionary leader and basically allow her to commit this massive fraud, which not only defrauded investors, but actually led to many, many people having false tests going on as the machines were used in Walgreens stores. It's also kind of a fascinating story matching what we see in the Weinstein story, where people sort of let Holmes get away with a little bit.

And once you've let her get away with a little bit, we let her get away with a little bit. And once you've let her get away with a little bit, we let her get away with more and more and more, and we continue to suppress doubt. Looking at a more prosaic example than Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, how about Volkswagen's diesel gate? What happened? Who knew about it? And how did Volkswagen's employees enable it? Volkswagen is a truly shocking story where Volkswagen basically marketed a diesel product under the guise that it was cleaner. In fact, it was far less clean. And they basically rigged the machinery to give false tests in a very, very intentional basis. For me, the amazing part of the Volkswagen story is how the loyalty to the company led so

many employees to be part of this story so that Volkswagen has never come forward and provided a full account of their wrongdoing, despite paying tens of billions of dollars in costs associated with basically being caught. But in addition to Volkswagen executives and Volkswagen engineers, we also have the unions who play an important role in Volkswagen. We also have the lower Saxony government where the main plant is located, who has seats on the board of Volkswagen. And on a regular basis, the unions and the government look the other way, where their main concern was Volkswagen is providing jobs. Jobs is what we want. And I think when you take a position on the board and you continually overlook hints of wrongdoing, you are complicit and you're part of the problem. And I think that that's the story in terms of Volkswagen, their professional employees, their union, the unions representing other employees and the Lower Saxony government. I think that they all owe society a great deal for the harm that they contributed to causing.

And how about another very different example, the Catholic Church? Yeah, so the Catholic Church, let's add in Michigan State, let's add in Penn State, and some other religious organizations as well, where we see this intense loyalty to the organization. And we want to protect the organization at all costs. And as we know, Penn State with the gymnasts, with Penn State with the assistant football coach, and with the Catholic Church, there were widespread instances of sexual assault and rape going on against children where senior officials in different parts of the world who would transfer priests known to have been assaulting children, where those assaults would continue on a regular basis. And what's fascinating about the story is that in so many specific examples, undoubtedly there were senior officials

who were simply blinded to the obvious harm that they were creating by their loyalty. And when we become overly loyal and we suppress critical thought, we become complicit in allowing truly horrific harm to happen in those contexts. These are all such different examples. Harvey Weinstein, Elizabeth Holmes, the Catholic Church, Volkswagen's Dieselgate. What were the reasons these presumably nice people were involved in enabling the despicable behavior?

It wasn't always because the organizations were such good organizations in their eyes. Well, thank you for the question. Your question is really the core of the book. The book's called Complicit. I originally called it Profiles in Complicity, where I talk about the various reasons why people end up acting complicit. And at the terrible end of the spectrum, we have people who are true partners,

who are kind of working with the visible harmdoer and want the same bad outcomes as the harmdoer. We also have collaborators. And I would put the lower Saxony government and the unions working with Volkswagen in the category of collaborators where they weren't focused on profit that they would get. They were focused on maintaining jobs in the region and they were willing to make a truly terrible trade, harming society, killing tens of thousands of people as a result of the pollution in order to keep the jobs flowing. But for most of us, I'm thinking of people, I don't know you that well, Lynn, but I'm thinking about nice people like you, certainly thinking about me. We tend to not be

partners or true collaborators in terrible harm. But I think we may end up allowing bad things to happen. And what I mean by that is, it may be that when we're privileged by the existing system, we stay too quiet. So you're a professor at Columbia, I'm a professor at Harvard, and I think one of the embarrassing aspects of elite institutions that exists into the 21st century is allowing legacy admission policies to continue to exist, where universities give favoritism to the children of alumni, to children of faculty, to children of donors, destroying the meritocracy that's possible. I know far too many faculty members who are silent on this issue because they, in fact, may well be the beneficiaries of this kind of privilege.

I think that sometimes kind of another profile is that we're lulled in by false prophets, whether it's Jim Jones getting people to drink the Kool-Aid, which wasn't actually Kool-Aid, at Jonestown killing his followers, or whether it's Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Newman. Too many leaders want to get people to follow them out of faith as opposed to using deliberation and reasoning. We already talked about it, but another profile is allowing the harm doer to do their harm because of authority and loyalty. And we covered that when we talked about Penn State and Michigan State and the Catholic Church. Another reason that we could become complicit has to do with our trust in others. And I spent chapter seven of my book documenting one of the

most embarrassing episodes in my career, where it turned out I published a paper with fraudulent data. And I certainly didn't commit the fraud. I could have found it before the paper was ever published. I could have taken a more proactive look at the data. I could have provided more oversight in terms of the data collection. But I put trust in others, trust that turns out was not particularly warranted. And as a result, my name appeared on a paper with data that was fabricated. And that's an embarrassment to me. So while I didn't do anything ethically malicious, I did allow the harm to happen because I was trusting others and not providing appropriate insight.

And finally, I think we too often sort of accept unethical systems. What I mean by unethical systems, when we're working in an organization that creates goals that people can't meet ethically and they act unethically to reach them. So I'm thinking of Wells Fargo setting standards that its employees in its branch offices couldn't meet, where the predictable result was fraudulent accounts being opened. But we can also think at a more societal level. In our country and most developed economies, we have what's called independent auditing, where companies are required to be audited by an independent auditing firm. And I happen to believe that the use of the term independent to go in front of auditing is fraudulent because we know that when people have a vested stake in seeing data in a particular way, they're no longer capable of objectivity. And the way we've created our auditing system in this country, and again, most countries,

we have incentives for auditing firms to please their clients, to get rehired, to sell them consulting services. And when we create corrupted systems, as we have in auditing and in terms of our credit rating agencies, we can't expect integrity to result. So when we accept these unethical systems and when Congress passes on the opportunity of reforming these corrupted institutions, we become complicit in the process of allowing fraudulent systems to exist. Are the enablers generally punished? Certainly not. And I want to be clear, not all enabling is criminal behavior. I'm not a lawyer,

so I'm not going to highlight what's legal and what's not legal. But certainly in the realm of true partners and collaborators, there is often illegal activity. But most of the other forms of complicity that I've just talked about, most of the other forms of complicity that I've just talked about, the more ordinary complicity or complicity that occurs without people being aware, it's not appropriate for the government in any way to go after these individuals. But rather than asking about legality or whether the organization punishes them. And too often the answer is no. I think we all want to think about our moral obligation. Who's the person that you want to be?

How do you want to look back on your career? And do you want to be somebody who allowed Harvey Weinstein to commit his rapes, to allow Elizabeth Holmes to lead patients to get false diagnoses. And I hope that my book is a call for lots of people to realize that they want to lead a more ethical life. And being ethical means going beyond not actively creating harm, but also seeing your obligation to stop harm when harm is being created by those around you. How pervasive and widespread do you think complicity is? I think complicity exists on a regular basis, and many of us are involved in it. So a few minutes

ago, I talked about how I view myself as complicit in publishing false data. I also can think of times when I'm complicit by not questioning things that are wrong in my organization. And I think that we can do a better job of standing up when we see people doing things that are inappropriate, when we see people being sexist or racist, rather than turning our head and moving back to problems that we're more comfortable with standing up. I also talk in the book about an episode where, for a variety of reasons, I noticed that an honorary society that I'm a part of, it's called the Academy of Management Fellows, had a system that allowed each of the approximately 200 members to nominate zero or one individual each year for possible membership. And then people would, in a variety of ways, vote on admitting the nominee.

And when I look at that in comparison to what we know from the diversity inclusion literature, having people nominate one person is a really bad formula because we're most likely to nominate a former student, a colleague, somebody who we're close to. And if you have an organization that not very far back consisted primarily of white males. And people think of the one person they most want to nominate. We don't do a good job of looking beyond the person right around us to think about who are the underrepresented individuals who should also be considered. And one of the interesting things about that story is that when I brought this to the attention of the organization, the vast majority of people wanted to do something about it.

So many of us were complicit in allowing a bad system for nominating people to this honor to exist. But once it came to our attention, people wanted to act and changes are being made to create a more equitable system. And I found the same process. I was hiking with a friend in the woods in Vermont. And this person was a former executive in a very well-known financial company. He was asking me what I was working on. I told him about Complicit. And he told me a fascinating story where he was working with a group who was doing a set of annual reviews. And when they got to one particular individual who was about to get a very positive review, he felt a moral obligation to say, but should we be concerned about multiple rumors

that he's harassing younger employees? And once he brought this up, the dam broke, and everybody else in the room had other independent observations concerning the same individual. And once they were aware of the frequency of the issue, then they all had the courage to act on it. So his willingness to speak up and bring up something slightly uncomfortable moved the whole group in an entirely different direction. And I think that that's so often the case. When something's wrong in an organization, we're not the only one who knows. But if the people who know say nothing, then too often we allow the harm to perpetuate. You believe that doctors are often complicit. Can you tell us about how and when they are complicit?

Sure. So first of all, I think doctors, like lots of other professionals, have lots of good people. And even the complicit doctors are often good doctors who don't even know that they're being complicit with wrongdoing. But in the worst case of doctor complicity, we can think of what are called pill mills, or basically medical organizations where doctors are writing lots of prescriptions for people to get substances that they shouldn't be getting. So in the opioid crisis, Eric Ayers wrote a book called Death and Mudlick, a terrific book, documenting the role of pharmacies and doctors and distributors in getting too many opioids into the hands of people who were abusing them. And when doctors are in that kind of operation, I think that they're in the realm of collaborators

who are intentionally creating evil for their own profit. But I think many other doctors agree to serve in a variety of consulting capacities for pharmaceutical firms. And once they receive money from those pharmaceutical firms, we know they have a greater propensity to prescribe the medicine of the company that's paying them consulting fees. And I would like my doctor to prescribe to me the very best medication for whatever's wrong with me,

not the medicine of the company that they happen to be getting consulting fees for. But once we're connected to an organization, we are no longer capable of the kind of independent judgment that many of us would like out of our physicians. What happens, Max, when doctors disclose their involvement? Doctors and other groups, one of the first things that they agree to is to agree to disclose. And so if you imagine a doctor saying, Lynn, I'm going to make a recommendation to you about how you should take care of whatever challenges you face, but I want to tell you first that I have a conflict of interest. So while the medicine I'm going to recommend to you, I believe is the best medicine for you, you should know that I've also worked for the company that makes this product.

I have now disclosed to you my conflict of interest. The problem is that the person making the disclosure feels that they've met their moral obligation through disclosure. And unfortunately, the other side feels, what a nice doctor. She was nice enough to tell me about her conflict of interest. And they trust the doctor even more. And this sort of ironic result of disclosure processes comes out of the fantastic work of Daly and Kane, Don Moore, George Lowenstein, Sunita Saha, some researchers who have done terrific work on the failure of disclosure to solve our problems in medicine, but also in lots of financial arenas as well.

Before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today, Max, is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't already talked about? Yes, I think I'm going to read to you the last paragraph of my book because it's something that captures the essence of the journey I've been through, but also what I hope readers of Complicit will obtain. So I'm reading now. I hope that if I had had access in 2011 to the knowledge that I have now about complicity, that I would have done more to stop the data fraud described in chapter seven. The data fraud story highlights the final message for avoiding complicity. When something is wrong, we must not accept the

easiest explanation. We need to be persistent until we fully understand what is going on. Sometimes this puts our relationships at risk. Sometimes it will be uncomfortable, but it's the ethical thing to do. So that's my closing message in the book. And it, I think, will convey the journey that I have found myself on thinking about my own complicity, but how I think the book can be beneficial to lots of other people who would like to move toward a more moral existence. I very much enjoyed the book, Max, and highly recommend it. What are the three takeaways? Three takeaways. In most of the scandals that you've read about in the newspaper or in a book or watched on a miniseries, the harmdoer could not have committed their harm or at least couldn't have committed their harm for so long without complicitors around them.

That's takeaway one. Takeaway two, many of us are more complicit in the harms in our organizations than we would care to admit. And this often occurs without thinking about the role that we play through our inaction. And then finally, the third takeaway, we can all learn to be better, to create more good and to help avoid more harm. I'm not trying to get people to feel bad about their past complicity. I'm trying to motivate all of us to be less complicit moving forward. Thank you, Max. This has been terrific. Thank you very much. And thanks for inviting me to talk to you.

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