Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Max H. Bazerman on How to Overcome Complicity and Create a More Ethical World EP 215

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Today I talk to Dr. Max H. Bazerman, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Max and I discuss his new book, "Complicit," and explore the root causes of complicity, how it's enabled and how to stop it. What We Discuss with Max H. Bazerman While It is easy to blame obvious offenders, we rarely consider the many people supporting their unethical or criminal behaviors. There was a corroborating cast of people who were complicit: business partners, investors, news organizations, employees, and others. And, whether we’re aware of it or not, most of us have been complicit in the unscrupulous behavior of others. We explore complicity through the stories of McKinsey, Arthur Andersen, Theranos, ExxonMobile, and BP and learn valuable lessons on not only what creates complicity but our role in allowing it to happen. --►Purchase Complicit: https://amzn.to/3E5b5ck  (Amazon Link) Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/max-h-bazerman-how-to-overcome-complicity/  Brought to you by Indeed, Masterclass, and InsideTracker. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/tbgI2kwidmA  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you hear my interview with Robin Sharma, one of the top personal mastery and leadership coaches in the world and a multiple-time number-one New York Times best-selling author? Catch up with episode 209: Robin Sharma on Why Changing the World Starts by Changing Ourselves ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Start podcast. I think we would all be well served to think about which of those groups do we want to be in. So, if we end up in a situation where our firm is acting in inappropriate ways, we're assigned to a consulting project where our client is acting in the fariest ways, how do we want to behave? And I think that a lot of us would have greater clarity about who we want to be and we don't stop to reflect on that enough. Welcome to PassionStruct.

Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer

listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 215 of PassionStruck. And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly.

A lesson and learn had to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for joining us, or you would like to introduce this to our friend or family member. We now have Episode Sturderpacks, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics, and you can find them either on Spotify or on our website at passionstruck.com slash starter packs. In case you missed my episodes from last week, they were all dedicated to veterans. I had on Silver Star

recipient, Jeff Struker, who was one of the heroes of Black Hawk Down, and I also had on Scott Velozio, who served in the Army National Guard in Deployed Daft Gamestan in 2010. And then my solo episode was on what does it mean to be a person of courage. Please check them all out if you haven't had an opportunity. And if you'd love today's episode or any of the ones I just mentioned, we would so appreciate it if you gave us a five star rating and a review, and I know both we and our guests love to see those and they go such a long way in helping us with our ratings in expanding the passion-struct community. Now let's talk about today's episode. While it's easy to blame, obvious offenders,

we rarely consider the many people supporting their unethical or criminal behaviors. There's typically a corroborating cast of people who were complicit, ranging from business partners, investors, news organizations, employees, and others. And whether or not we're aware of it, most of us have been complicit and unscrupulous behavior. Our guest today, Professor Max Baserman, believes that seven

different behavior profiles lead to misconduct or complicity. Ranging from true supporters to those who unknowingly benefit from the offenses that others commit. In our interview, Dr. Baserman offers a path to creating a more ethical world by describing how individuals, leaders, and organizations and more effectively prevent complicity. Max H. Baserman is the Jesse Isador Strauss, professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. Max is the author or co-author of 13 different books, including decision leadership, better-not-perfect, blind spots, and his brand new book, which releases today, complicit how we enable the unethical and how to stop. His awards include an honorary doctorate

from the University of London, life achievement awards from the Aspen Institute, and the International Association of Conflict Resolution. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me of London. Life Achievement awards from the Aspen Institute and the International Association of Conflict Resolution. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am a static to welcome Max Beeserman back to the Passion Struck podcast. Welcome Max. Thank you John. It's honored to be invited back to your show again. It's an extreme honor for me to have you one of the most prominent behavioral scientists in the world coming back as being my first repeat guest. So what an honor for me as well.

Thank you so much. And if the listener didn't hear your last episode, it was on decision leadership with Professor Don Moore, your peer from Berkeley. And so I just want to refer to that in case they miss that book and that episode. And today we're going to be discussing your brand new book which releases today

complicit. Congratulations on its release. Thank you. I'm very excited about this new project. Max, this is your third book that you've written on ethics. The first two were blind spots and better not perfect. What is the backdrop that led you to writing this third book. Sure, the backdrop to this new book goes back to the insurrection or coup attempt depending on what you wanna call it on January 6th, 2021, when a set of events unfolded at US Capitol that many of us could never have possibly imagined. And I was struck by the fact

that no one individual could have made this happen without a whole bunch of people around him that allowed it to occur. So I became fascinated with why so many people who I might not agree with politically, but I would have never have imagined would have participated in the destruction of democracy. Would have allowed Trump to develop in the way that he did so that he would actually lead the insurrection that we saw happen on January 6, 2021. And that became the real motivating force. And when I looked back at my prior work on ethics, I wrote a book called Blind Spots with Anne-Ten Brunsel, and the psychology of why good people do bad things without any intent. And I wrote a book called Better Not Perfect on how to improve things. And both of those projects really come to fruition in helping us understand what happened in terms of how so many people who believe in democracy allowed an attempt to destroy democracy to develop. And what we need to do to move forward so that evil doers have less what they have done in the past. If the people around them weren't as complicit as we have seen across so many episodes. Yeah, I'm going to ask you about

something that's not in your book. It's a new development, but Twitter during the time that the president was the president ended up blocking his account, which depending on which side of the aisle you sat on, some people rejoiced at some people, thought they were demons. What is your thought in Elon Musk taking this over and how he has talked about running the platform and how it could create more complicity in the future?

Yeah, so I think it's a legitimate source of debate on whether you should block an individual based on their past. And so whether Trump should be allowed on Twitter, I think it's a matter of debate. I have my own preference on that topic, but I think it should be less of a debate on whether freedom of speech should include the freedom of speech which recommends suppressing the freedom of other people. So I'm pretty big fan of civil liberties, but I'm not a big fan of allowing hate speech. And for Musk to take over Twitter, And for Musk to take over Twitter, what looks like will probably be a financial loss

in order to open up Twitter to vitriol and heat speech at a level that we could never have imagined. I think it's a pretty terrible force in terms of creating new civility in the United States system. So for me, what Musk is doing is unfortunate that we shouldn't have the hate speech allowed the way Musk is opening up Twitter to allow it. We will definitely see how it evolves and whether he does go through with this $8 subscription idea that he's been speaking about. I know that your colleagues have done a ton to influence your

understanding of ethics. And I've had quite a few of the people you highlight at the beginning of your book on this show, including Katie Melkman, Don Moore, that we talked about already, and most recently, Dolly Chug, how have your co-authors and colleagues helped influence your thoughts on this topic? To begin with, I'm proud to say that all three of the people you mentioned were my doctoral advisors

at some point. And now my peers and beyond, you mentioned three kind of outstanding social scientists among the people that do list. And I would say that I've long had fantastic doctor students who have influenced my ideas a tremendous amount. I also mentioned Anne Tenbrunsel, my co-author of Blind Spots, who was also a doctor of IZ.

And sort of Anne Tenbrunsel and David Messick, my now deceased former colleague at the Kellogg School, and in Dave where the ethics people at Kellogg when I thought on the faculty there until 1998. And they opened up my ideas, my mind to the social science of ethical behavior. And then when I arrived at Harvard in 2000, I started to spend a lot of time

with Professor Mazurin Benagy, the psychologist, most commonly recognized as the creator of the idea of implicit bias, and Dolly Chug, who was a doctoral student, who studied with both Mazurin and myself. My interaction with them really kind of turbocharged my interest in ethics and at blossom from there. So I would say that almost all of my ideas on ethics have been influenced by kind of other scholars who have affected

how I think about the world. I would certainly add Josh Green from the psychology department at Harvard now who wrote a book called Moral Tribes which is is a phenomenal book. And Josh is trained as a philosopher. I kind of often describe him as my philosophy, too, to so that I could catch up on what I should have studied while I'm going to go. Great, thank you for that. And in today's episode, so the audience understands, we're going to be talking about a number of examples

of both individuals and companies to demonstrate what complicity is. And the first one we're going to touch on, you introduced right at the beginning of your book, and it is the firm McKenzie. And I think there have been a number of cases over the recent years where McKenzie has been complicit, especially as they have changed from has been complicit, especially as they have changed from being a strategy advisor to helping their clients start implementing the strategic advice that they're given. But what you highlighted at the beginning

is $573 million settlement with 47 US states for working to help turbocharge, produce sales efforts. I think this is a good opening discussion of how McKenzie was complicit in the opioid crisis, and also their conflict of interest with the Food and Drug Administration. Can you explain more background on this and how McKenzie's dual role worked against the general public's interests. Sure, so there are a few pieces there. So we'll try to unpack that

and then you can let me know what I don't cover. To begin with, I think that consulting firm or a consultant and I've served as a consultant for many days of my career, I think a consultant is responsible for the advice that they give. And I don't think that we should hide behind the fact. It was only advice that was someone else

who made the decision. And McKinsey has repeatedly hid behind ethical scandals in which they advised by saying it wasn't our decision. But the evidence on Purdue pharmaceuticals in the degree to which they got some of their most nefarious ideas about how to add it more and more people and how to increase the level of addiction is stunning. And so many of those ideas are clearly traceable to McKinsey and that's part of the reason that they were willing to settle and pay section enormous fine. Companies don't easily pay over a half a billion dollars

as a fine if they weren't guilty in some form for the harm that was created. But making McKinsey's role in the opioid crisis which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, all the worse is the conflict of interest that you alluded to. They were simultaneously taking on projects for the FDA on how to regulate pharmaceutical firms while they were using what they were learning from the FDA

to advise Purdue pharmaceutical on how they could really turbocharge their sales. And they did this without making the appropriate disclosures that are required by the FDA in terms of conflict of interest. So this whole story has McKinsey's fingerprints all over the devastation that has hit so many people and so many families in a truly devastating way. So when I think of someone as being complicit, I think of them standing by

or facilitating the harm doing of others, the McKinsey opioid story, it's not a subtle level of complicity. It's a very active level of complicity where in order to obtain the fees that they were receiving both from pharmaceutical firms but also the FDA, they were willing to give advice

that was clearly creating enormous harm to society as a whole. Yes, another example of this that I want to touch on and we discussed this also in our past interview was Enron. And I want to discuss it because I'm very familiar because I live this myself. But when we think of Enron and how their entire leadership team was overall misleading the public, misleading shareholders, misleading the board, misleading employees who were compelled to either follow what they were saying or be kicked out of the firm. I think some of those things we can understand.

Why was what Arthur Anderson did in conjunction with management, such a complicit act that eroded trust and not only that, but ended up helping Enron mislead so many people. Another multi-pronged question here. So let me start by saying as a tie into our last discussion, so McKinsey was very involved in the Enron story as well. McKinsey was selling advice on how to create the secure position processes that NRON ended up using. So we have McKinsey's fingerprints on the NRON story as well. And that's very well documented in the new book

that they came out in the last month when McKinsey comes to town. They document the McKinsey NRON story and ways that I do not in any book that I've written. But you also brought up Arthur Anderson, who was the auditor of Enron. Arthur Anderson, what was performed the role that we call independent auditor. And then the US and the most developed economies, a corporation has to be audited by a quote-unquote independent auditor. I've written in a variety of places that I think it's pretty fraudulent for this industry to claim that they provide independent audits.

When they want to get we hired by the companies that they work for, they want to sell consulting services to the companies that they audit, and the people who do the audit to often take jobs with the companies that they're auditing. So I basically argue that we don't have an independent auditing system in our country. We have an auditing system, but it's, but because of conflicts of interest in the auditors wanting to please the clients, we don't get the independence that we were looking for when we created the idea that firms should be independently audited to begin with.

And there's just lots of evidence that there were some people within Arthur Anderson who were like implicit in the sense that they knew what was going on and they went along with the fraud that was occurring at Enron. And there were lots and lots of other people who worked for Arthur Anderson who were doing their job. And I think they simply didn't notice

that they were saying, okay, two processes that were clearly unacceptable by any legal or moral standard. And I think that this distinction between explicit versus implicit is all of the Arthur Anderson story in terms of there can be people who are explicitly complicit because they know what's going on and they say okay. But a more

common form of complicity that affects lots of us is that we're biased because of conflict of interest for example. And we aren't independent, but we're not even aware of the mistakes that we're making. And I think many of the mid to lower level employees at Arthur Anderson probably met no harm, but they were working within a system that I don't think should exist to begin with, and that led them toward a pattern of complicity. It was interesting because I arrived as we were splitting Anderson consulting away from Arthur Anderson, which in many ways was to create this more independence between the two

organizations, but then Arthur Anderson went right back and created Anderson business consulting, which by the time Enron demise unfolded had become probably the eighth largest consulting firm in the world in a very short period of time. But for the listeners who might not be familiar with it, under Arthur Anderson you had the tax partners who were working on Enron, you had the audit partners, and then under the audit component of Arthur Anderson was a group that handled, you could say independent audits and assurance, but they had a group within Houston that was very different from every other office, I think, within Arthur

Anderson and they were experts in trading floor operations. And so you had this group that sat underneath the actual audit function, who were the main consultants for Enron on Enron Online, which was driving the vast majority of Enron's profits as well. And then you also had people from the Anderson Business Consulting Group who were also doing work. And as an insider watching this unfold, I think that difficulty that arose for people to vent their concern was that we were getting paid so much that I would say at least 50% of the office, if not more, were employees

who were working on Enron. And so it made raising your hand very difficult given the consequences that would have come about. But I agree with you that there were some people who were very closely in the inner circle of this and knew exactly what was going on. There were a smaller subset who were raising their hands as loudly as they could saying they needed to stop, but there were a vast majority of employees

who had no idea that what they were doing was wrong. So I just wanted to give that further explanation so that people understood the inner workings. And I think we would all be well served to think about which of those groups do we want to be in. If we end up in a situation where our firm is acting in inappropriate ways or if we're assigned to a consulting project where our client

is acting in the various ways, how do we want to behave? And I think that a lot of us would have greater clarity about who we want to be and we don't stop to reflect on that enough. And hopefully my book will provide some inspiration to readers to think about who do they want to be and how they're going to respond when wrongdoing is occurring around them. I think that brings me to a fundamental question of the book, which is that complicit focuses on the overlooked importance of others or complicit in their bad behavior. Why did you think that this was such an important topic to uncover and write about? I'll give you two answers, one which I alluded to early. Simply January 6, 2021, led me to say how could this possibly occur?

And I concluded this couldn't have occurred without lots of complicitors occurring. And coupled with that, if we go back to the book I wrote with Ann Tendgrensol, Blind Spots, it's about the unethical behavior of ordinary people, people who we could think of as good people, people who we think of like ourselves. And we show the ways in which good people sometimes do bad things without their own awareness. And I think part of the reason that the behavioral ethics community moved to that topic was that we didn't think we knew how to stop the next Bernie made-off from engaging in their evil. So we didn't think we knew how to stop the next Bernie made off from

engaging in their evil. So we didn't know enough about a clinical intervention to change the worst in our society. So we looked away from the evil doers to the regular people who might also be doing things that are wrong. And what I walked away with in January and February of 2021 is the observation that we may not be able to change the Bernie made off. But if we could change the people around Bernie made off, then Bernie made off couldn't get away with what he did and same with Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Newman and the sacklers and so on and so forth. It was the January 6, 2021 prompting of the thought that if we want to stop the truly evil events, the source may not be some kind of clinical conversion of the wrong doer,

but the empowering of the people around them to not be a complicit. I'm gonna get to Theranos here in a little bit because I think it's a really good case study to unpack, but that's jumping to the third part of your book. So I wanted to enter into the second part of your book, which is where you explore ordinary complicity. And I thought it was interesting how you raised

the question of privilege being a factor in complicity. Why is that the case? So sometimes it was wrong doing around us, but we benefit from it. And I think we have self-serving biases to not question systems that favor us. Many years ago, I was giving a talk at the Stanford Psychology Department and Lee Ross, one of the great social psychologists at the time, he recently passed away, but he was a little bit obsessed with the fact that business school professors

got paid so much more than psychology professors. One of his doctoral students professors got paid so much more than psychology professors. One of his doctoral students had recently taken a job in a business school and was being paid more than me was making as a very famous full professor. And I was giving a talk on social comparison processes. And Lee was obsessed with this paid differential between the two different parts of a university. And in other countries, professors in different colleges get paid very similarly.

So America is somewhat unique in terms of having the market determine what one group gets paid versus the other. And that evening, after I gave the seminar, we're meeting in a smaller group of the social psychology group. And he finally said to me, you know, Max, what's annoying me about our argument is you're not even bothered by the pay and equity between our two departments. And I'm sure as many of your listeners

would be in favor of market-based determination of pay. And I can easily justify why business school professors might get paid more than psychology professors. But he had a tremendous observation. On the downside, he was obsessed by the issue. On the upside, and let's call it privilege, I didn't even bother to notice it. I never thought about, is it unfair

that I'm getting paid more than psychology professors? There was a non-issue to me. And I think that when we're privileged by our position, we too often don't notice things that are wrong. So I'm a professor at a very prestigious university. And if you ask me, what do elite universities do wrong in this country? I would say the biggest goal that we'll look at when we look back at this period of time is the fact that we continue to allow legacy preferences in admissions.

And many elite universities for fundraising reasons, for community building reasons, give preference in the admissions process, the children of donors, alumni, faculty. And I think to give additional privilege to the privilege is truly inappropriate behavior. But I'm even more stunned by the fact that this isn't a big issue on campus, that there aren't more faculty who speak up about the fact

that our organization is involved in what is a morally unacceptable set of practices. And I think the reason that we're so accepting is, well, but we're benefiting. And we would like our children to get those preferences. And as a result, we're too silent on fixing a problem whose time has come for us to address that issue. So we can see privilege in these ways. And I also find the word privilege to be pretty interesting because someone walked up to me 10 years ago and said, Max,

you're privileged. I would have found that to be a bizarre comment. Like I'm a scrappy inner city kid from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, grew up as a ballpark vendor, paid most of my way through college and my own. I don't think of myself as a ballpark vendor, paid most of my way through college and my own. I don't think of myself as a privileged person in a traditional sense. But when I look at sort of the opportunities that I have for a variety of somewhat random, somewhat systematic reasons, it's very clear that I'm privileged in lots of ways and comparison to lots of other people. And I think that if we all look at how we're privileged, where we may well be in a better position to stand up for what's right rather than what's convenient for us. This is the Passion Struck Podcast with our guest, Max Bezerman, we'll

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Now, back to my interview with Max Baserman. Yeah, it's interesting. You bring that example up. When I worked at Lowe's, I think because it was harder to hire some of the higher IT talent, we were paid more than our peers in the business were. However, when I was at Dell, it was a little bit flipped where they valued the sales organization and sales a lot more than they valued the internal IT department and what they were creating a value for the company.

So I've seen that myself play out. So I just want to do acknowledge that. I did think you raised another good example in that chapter about how the US tax code is colorblind and is also causing the same thing to happen. Can you just go into that a little bit? Sure, I think the US tax code, which is largely rigged by people who are pretty well off in society, basically favors the public. So the fact that there is long been a tax break for your mortgage payments, that obviously benefits

people who can afford to own a house. Now, the tax benefits of mortgage payments have changed in recent years. But the simple idea that we're going to give benefit for a particular deduction, specifically the people who can own homes and not the people who don't, really benefits the privilege. And we can go from there to lots of examples of carried interest in terms of

the venture capital private equity world where we give tax benefits to the very richest in society. And if we started from scratch and say what would a fair, a tax code system look like, we wouldn't be for anything close to that. But the privilege for our often in Congress often create these systems and are able to do so without even thinking about the harm that they're creating based on the fact that you're gaining benefit from these somewhat bizarre sets of rules. and how we accept unethical organizational systems. And I wanted to ask, why are the conflicts of interest that we accept

as a society such a major reason for concern? So we already talked about the auditing story. So society wants us to be able to audit the books of corporations so that other third parties can trust those books. And we've created a system where yet no comfort at all from an independent audit the way they're currently done in this country.

But there's also conflicts of interest in lots of other industries where we care a lot about it. A parallel to the audit story is a credit rating agency story where credit rating agencies help contribute to the great recession in 2007 to 2009. In large part because they were trying to please the parties who securities they were waiting. And significant part, the great recession was heavily influenced by very similar conflicts of interest. But we can also think about it in terms of a simple visit to your doctor.

And we've allowed a system to develop where doctors are often receiving consulting contracts, grants, speaking fees, from pharmaceutical firms. And would you like to know that the doctor who's prescribing you one medicine, when there are three different options available, is being paid by the company whose drug is being recommended to you? I think that I would like to know that. And unfortunately, too often, we are getting bias advice from doctors. And it's not just on medicine. Surgeons tend to operate radiologists prefer a different form of intervention. And I think it's unfortunate that the patient doesn't have access to how their doctor might be affected by

conflict of interest policies. And I think that our medical institutions should do a better job of thinking about how would we get unbiased advice rather than a current bias advice that we're currently getting. So by allowing doctors to simultaneously be paid from one of the pharmaceutical firms that they might prescribe, ends up having a dysfunctional influence on the advice that we're getting from our medical institutions. Well, the other side of that that I thought was interesting and I'm glad you brought that example up because I was gonna go there,

is you raised in your research that it showed that most physicians and you rightly pointed out not all are unaware of their biases that affect their behaviors. Why do you think that's the case? Because to me, as I look at this, it's pretty obvious. I remember when the pharmaceutical industry was allowed to do more entertaining and other things like that, it just seems this is a disaster waiting to happen.

Yeah, I think a lot of us can understand how the system is biased if someone else is being influenced. But we think our own ethicality makes us immune. We think I'm an honest person, therefore I'm not affected. That would make sense if this bias was all explicit. That if you imagine the doctor is getting paid a lot affected. That would make sense if this bias was all explicit. If you're imagining the doctor is getting paid a lot to prescribe drug A over drug B and knows that B is better than A, would they actually prescribe A over B knowing

it's a bad decision? Most of the time the answers know they wouldn't do that. The problem is that once I caked the money from company A, I tend to be biased in the research evidence and how I interpret the information that's made available. I spend more time talking to the people who work at Firm A, and I learn about the advantages of that product without spending as much time learning about company B. So that when I'm telling you, John, you really should take drug A. And that's a product I would take if I was in your situation.

I actually mean it. I believe in drug A, but I believe in it because of how I've been influenced by my consulting arrangement with company A. So simply awareness that bias can happen doesn't eliminate our tendency to be biased. So let me bring this home in a somewhat different context. If you ask the friend, how smart is your child?

Okay, would you expect them to give you a accurate answer? Quite honestly, I would expect an honest, Would you expect them to give you a accurate answer? Quite honestly, I would expect an honest, but I wouldn't expect an accurate answer because I know parents are biased to see their children as more attractive, to be smarter and to have a greater likelihood of success in the future than reality dictates. But none of that changes the fact

that any specific parent, when they tell you about your child, they believe exactly what you're saying. When we have a vested self interest in seeing data in a particular way, we're incapable of objectivity. We're capable of understanding how the virus affects someone else, but we have a harder time seeing it, how it affects us.

And I think the same applies to the medical doctor. Okay, and I think it was also good how you raised the fact that goals can drive down ethics. And I think this is something that anyone who's and almost any company has seen where you've got the company's core values plastered everywhere, but you have shareholders driving many of the company's goals, which tend to go against many of those core values in cases. I think one perfect example of that is the impact that's happening to climate change, where so many of the goals of profitability are

getting in the way of things that companies who in many cases are the largest contributors of this carbon footprint are doing to exasperate the situation and go against many of the core values that so many of the employees would love for them to entertain. So I don't know if you have another good example, but that's one I just wanted to raise. Lots of them, but I think you have it exactly right. An organization can state some ambiguous mission, value statement, credo, or whatever.

But if they then have goals that they reward people on, that push in a very different direction to often the financial goals end up winning out. And in the climate change world, we can think of the story of British petroleum who brought us the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf. Before that happened, many saw them as the greenest of all the oil companies.

And in many ways, I think that they believed that they were the green company. And they went from British petroleum to BP standing for beyond, beyond petroleum. And I think that was real, but they also had a variety of goals about how to cut the costs of producing. And as they drove down the costs, security was something that they slipped up on. And clearly those slips contributed to this massive spill that we saw in the Gulf. But we could think of a very different domain.

So if we think about Wells Fargo, who was guilty of signing up customers for lots of products that they ended up paying for without the customer having any idea what was going on. All of that goes back to executives and managers imposing completely unreasonable goals on their branch offices and threatening people with losing their jobs if they don't cross sell more products.

If you can't legitimately cross sell more products. If you can't legitimately cross sell more products, you're going to lose your job if you don't have more cross selling going on what happens. And I think we remember the answer, the Wells Fargo was deeply fraudulent in the behavior of lots of people at the lowest level who were forced into unethical behavior based on the goal of the organization I created. Yeah, and I'm going to just give one more example and I'm going to go back to your energy one and that is ExxonMobil, who was unearthed in the Carbon Albin Act that Seth Goden and

his contributors put together, but there was a memo from the 1980s, from one of the chief executives and researchers with an axon mobile who pointed out that if they continue the ways of the company and what they were doing, it was going to lead to what we're seeing today with climate change and it was buried and ignored and nothing was done with it until just recently when they've acknowledged its existence.

So that's just another example. Yeah, so X1 in much of the industry went from denying the climate change existed to denying the humans were causing it. And as each of these became unpenable to stick with, they simply retreated to another position and ignored the misinformation they had created in the past. And for me, the reason that I don't go to exon or mobile stations any longer is the misrepresentation that they've engaged in and the ways in which they funded organizations

that were providing misinformation about the science that even exon knew to be true. misinformation about the science that even X on new to be true. I'm going to jump to part three of your book. This is where you get into Theranos exploring acting on complicity. And I was hoping you could explore the psychology of complicity by discussing what happened at Theranos and what were the factors that caused the mass of fraud to occur. and what were the factors that caused the mass of fraud to occur? Yeah, so I think that Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Boane was the president and also Elizabeth Holmes romantic partner at the time. I think that they ended up on a slippery slope. So I think that Elizabeth Holmes went from typical Silicon Valley exaggeration to then not being able to meet commitments that she had stated before and she escalated her behavior to a pattern that involved fraud and actually using faulty medical equipment done actual patients and their behavior was truly abominable and we should hear the sentencing for both of their crimes and their behavior was truly abominable, and we should hear the sentencing for both of their crimes and their relatively near future.

Their behavior, I think of as the core harm doers who were harming public health in order to profit, but we can see how they got there. One step at a time escalating their behavior, but the stunning part for me of the Theranos story But we can see how they got there. One step at a time escalating their behavior. But the stunning part, for me, of the Theranos story, is how you could have a very prestigious board of directors with very famous leaders who sat around the table

and nobody even recognized that they lacked the medical knowledge to evaluate what Elizabeth Holmes was telling them. And they never asked critical questions when they were provided with critical information about Elizabeth Holmes, they quickly rejected it. And then included George Schultz of rejecting the information that came to him from a pharaoh's employee who happened to be his grandson, Tyler Schultz,

who ends up being one of the heroes of the Theranos story. But the degree to which a board to be negligent is simply stunning. And I think that any of us who take positions on boards, whether it's a for-profit board or an after-profit board, should realize that we have responsibility

to actually provide oversight. And if we're not prepared to be to provide that oversight, we don't belong on the board of directors of an organization. But we also see the story of Walgreens, who basically is concerned that CVS will swoop in and do a deal with Theranos before they do. And Walgreens brings the Theranos faulty technology into their stores and uses the Theranos technology to give faulty diagnoses to their customers or patients. It's a stunning story. And Walgreens hires a technical consultant

who basically says that Theranos is avoiding letting us have the data to accurately assess their technology. And they remain obsessed about not letting CDS get to technology first. And they bring the Theranos machines into Walgreens and it completely and totally negligent fashion. I don't think that they were trying to harm their patients, but they were so obsessed with the goal of landing the technology and their stories

rather than having CBS do so, that they acted in a completely and appropriately in an unethical way. Yeah, I think the other part of this story that I found interesting is that you teach very senior executives in many of the classes that you teach, especially I'm guessing in the executive sessions that you do, it was interesting to me

how you posed this question on Theranos to these senior executives and asked them to come up with the reasons and by and far the largest one that came up was putting the blame on Elizabeth herself as basically a single cause of this situation. And my follow on to this is what is the fallacy of this single cause mindset? Sure, so long ago Ann McGill did her dissertation research on single cause reasoning. And simply stated, we like a simple single cause to explain what happened even when there's lots of causes.

So if you ask me what caused the problem of Theranos, I would say, Elizabeth Holmes, an ethical behavior, Sunny Boane's, an ethical behavior, completely negligent board, completely incompetent Walgreens team, a number of employees who looked the other way and didn't speak out because of their own concerns about their own career. So we can come up with lots of different explanations. And I don't think we should be picking between them. I think we should recognize that there are lots of causes of most bad events that happen. But there was a group of executive students who had already studied the Theranos case and knew about all the complexity. But a couple months later, I simply asked them to put

into check function as I'm teaching them online, what caused the scandal at Theranos? And the amazing feature is that the vast majority gave me a simple answer and that was some version of Elizabeth Holmes on ethical behavior. And what we see in that story is that whenever there's a terrible event, the media provides us with a focus on the core wrongdoer, and that's exactly what most of us

want to hear. We want to know, can you give me a simple answer for what caused the bad event? And as a result, we look at the core harm doer, but we aren't paying attention to the complicators. And again, a central theme of the book, the harm doer couldn't have gotten away with what they did if so many of us weren't complicit

as we surrounded them and did too little or nothing at all. We've talked about a great number now of company examples or government organizational examples of this, but I wanted to tie in an individual example of this. And in chapter 10 titled Confronting Our Complicity, you showcase the story of Eric Anuland who was in the office of Eric Anuland, who was in the Office of Legal Counsel of the US Department of Justice.

But how did she confront her own complicity, and what can we learn from her story? So Eric Anuland is a young woman who I've spoken to, one, I've never met her in person, and he's one of my heroes. So she worked in the Department of Justice and the office as you suggested,

that provided oversight over executive orders by the president's office. And I guess she took this her job in 2016, fully expecting to be working for Hillary Clinton. And then boom, Trump was the president. I think it's pretty clear she was appalled by many actions of Donald Trump, including the Muslim band.

And then she found her trying to provide some limitations on the executive orders that were coming out of the White House. But she clearly felt her office was doing too little and too slowly to control that behavior. And she would hear things like, we're just following orders. And then people say, yeah, we know that's what Denazi said, but we're not Denazi's. And so she became increasingly comfortable

with what was going on in terms of Trump limiting the rights of particular groups of American citizens. And then the Tree of Life massacre occurred where a white supremacist opened fire in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And at that point, Eric and Evelyn quit. And then she later wrote in our bed where she clarified she felt she couldn't continue

working to basically provide cover for white supremacist activities that were coming out of the White House and activities were encouraged by the actions of Donald Trump. So she quit. But what was interesting is that her editorial in the New York Times highlights the fact that she viewed herself as complicit because she went along and stayed in her job and ended up providing cover for Trump for far too long. And as I read this as I was just beginning to work on the topic of complicity, I thought if Eric and Nulin is complicit, okay, my gosh, so many of the rest of us have been complicit in our organizations as well. And do I want to be somebody who goes through life not speaking up with that complicity on me or do I want to follow her role model? And my answer is I want to come as close to Erica Nulin as a role model as I possibly can't.

So I found her to be quite inspiring. I also found Tyler Schultz, who is a grandson of George Schultz, who was on the board of Theranos, who ends up being key to stopping Theranos from continuing to misdiagnose patients, to be another kind of inspiring person who spoke up. And one of the things that's fascinating about Tyler Schultz is that before he speaks up, he talks to a co-worker

who has very similar suspicions. And one of the things that we find across lots of stories is that when people realize that they're not alone in their suspicion. But there's multiple people with similar suspicions. It empowers us to move forward and to be more vocal. And I think another good case study that you brought up was the US women's gymnastics organization and how they failed to do the one thing

that they must do, which is to protect the gymnasts themselves and how Simone Biles and several of the other gold medal athletes have used their platform to showcase the wrong that was done and the corrections that needed to be made. We don't need to go into that, but I thought that was another great point that you brought up. I did, though, want to talk about another individual who faced a very difficult challenge. And this is Senator Romney. And you highlight in the book that Carolyn Kennedy wrote, Senator Romney's commitment to

our Constitution makes him a worthy successor to the senators who inspired her father, John F. Kennedy, to write his Pulitzer-winning book Profiles and Courage. Why did you choose to highlight that? One, I was impressed by Romney's behavior. And I'm similarly impressed by Liz Jamie's behavior in recent times and being willing to be part of the House Committee to look into the January 6th of activities. In both cases, they acted with significant political risk because I think that they were actually trying to do the right thing. And my own politics are very different than Mitt Romney or

Liz Jamie. But I think that we should recognize when people are acting in the interests of the public good based on their beliefs about how the world should behave. And so I don't think that I can sit down with Mitt Romney or Liz Jamie and Richard Reeman on last of the core political issues of the front desk, but I can still admire them having the political courage of not being complicit with the activities that we saw under the Trump administration.

Okay, so let's bring this home for the listener, a person who's sitting out there who might be of a leader of an organization, maybe they're an employee in one of these organizations, or part of a government body. How can those people reduce the likelihood of complicit behaviors going forward? Sure. So first of all, there are places like the government accountability project that represents whistleblowers. If you see truly a Greekist behavior in your organization, go to the government accountability project website to learn more about legal options that might be available to you.

Second, talk to other people who you trust in the organization who you think might have witnessed the same behaviors or actions that you've witnessed because there's power in numbers. Make yourself valuable. The more valuable you are to your organization, the easier it is to speak up because if you're valuable, there's more of a reason that they need to listen to what you have to say. And to the extent that you improve your personal excellence, and you're not beholden to this organization and can find another position, it may provide you with the ability to speak up because the downside of upsetting people isn't as large to you. So I think that there's a variety of steps that all of us can think about how to increase our ability to act in a courageous way and to be less complicit in the future. Okay, and I will just end by saying to the audience

that I think this book in conjunction with Dolly's most recent book, A More Just Future, I found that the two went hand in hand because they're both really examining the science of good people. Purs more from the standpoint of our inherent biases, but in both cases, they both articulate how both on an individual level and in your book more on an organizational level, but also individual book more on an organizational level, but also individual, our behaviors can become complicit. Yeah, so I'll quickly say, I learned so much about the person I want to be by talking to and meeting Dulley's work. So I just find her insights inspiring as a human being. And he's

tremendously influenced both my book, Better Not Perfect, but also the book complicity. And then Max, my last question would be, if the reader wants to know more about you, where your other books, et cetera, I'll put a lot of this in the show notes, but is there a best place that they can go to? Sure, so wait, for me Max, based your mind at the Harvard Business School,

I'm easy to find, and my website will provide you with more details. Well Max, thank you again for being a repeat guest. I really enjoyed this book and, again, our conversation. Thank you again for coming on. Thank you for inviting me back to on. I appreciate that. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Max Bezerman and I wanted to thank Max and Princeton Press for giving me the honor and opportunity to interview him. And especially Max, thank you for being the first repeat guest that I've had on this show. Links to all things Max will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show.

Those proceeds go to keeping it free for all our listeners. Videos are on YouTube. At JohnRMiles, please go subscribe and check out the over 400 videos that we have there. Avertise our deals and discount codes are on passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm at JohnRMiles both on Twitter and Instagram, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I book amazing guests like Max, it's because of my network. Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Start Podcast interview that I did with Christopher Palmer, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Business

School, and the director of the Department, the Post Graduate, and continuing education at McLean Hospital. He's the author of the brand new book, which launches this week, Brain Energy, a revolutionary breakthrough in understanding mental health and improving treatment for anxiety, depression, OCD and PTSD. Mental disorders are increasing in prevalence as we talked about, but they are now the leading cause of disability in the United States and on planet Earth.

And the number one diagnosis that disables more human beings than any other medical diagnosis is depression, plain old depression. Depression is now the second most common chronic health disorder, second only imprevelence to obesity. The fee for this show is that you share it with your friends and family members when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone who's dealing in a situation where they may be complicit or are facing others who are doing unethical behavior,

please share this episode with them. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life-assioned struck. Thank you.