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Defining Moments
A
RECENT NOVEL,
The Remains of the Day, describes the reflec-
tions of a British butler, Stevens, who is traveling through
the British countryside and struggling to come to peace with
his career and his life.
1
The life of a 60-year-old butler may seem
an odd source of lessons about contemporary life and the difficult
decisions managers must sometimes make. Yet the author, Kazuo
Ishiguro, thought otherwise and once explained his choice of a
main character by saying simply, ‘‘We are all butlers.’’
2
During his travels, Stevens spends much of his time thinking
back on a handful of choices, some made 25 years earlier, that
irrevocably shaped his life and career. As he recalls these decisions,
Stevens sometimes feels pride, more often sorrow. Most painful,
perhaps, is his realization that he didn’t understand all that was at
stake when he made his life-shaping choices. Only now, looking
back, does he see how, during a few precious moments, he held
his life in his hands and irrevocably defined its course.
Stevens’s choices were defining moments. So, too, are the right-
versus-right decisions that managers must sometimes make. Rebecca
Dennet, Steve Lewis, Peter Adario, and Edouard Sakiz all stood at
a crossroads. Important values, personal and professional, pointed
54
Defining Moments 55
in different directions. Neither the grand principles nor their ethical
intuitions could give them the right answer. The pressure was
intense; much was uncertain. Like Stevens, they could easily mis-
judge what was really at stake, for themselves and others, and make
choices they would long regret. Such risks are unavoidable, for
managers and for anyone else with serious responsibilities for others’
lives.
Fortunately, however, there are ways to load the dice in favor
of practical, responsible decisions—choices that managers can look
back on with a sense of achievement, pride, and honor. The first
step in this direction is understanding the ways in which right-
versus-right decisions are defining moments in managers’ lives and
careers.
T
HE
A
PEX OF A
C
AREER
John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, provides us
with a powerful and insightful starting point. In his book Ethics,
written in 1908, Dewey writes that important ethical decisions have
two important aspects. The public side is what other people can
observe, such as a person’s actions and their consequences. The
private side, in contrast, is more subtle. In Dewey’s phrase, it involves
the ways in which ethical decisions ‘‘form, reveal, and test the self.’’
3
Dewey’s phrase is brief—only six short words—yet it casts a power-
ful, illuminating light on what is at stake when managers make right-
versus-right choices and the basic ways in which these choices are
defining moments. We will see shortly how revealing, testing, and
shaping are key elements of defining moments.
Although The Remains of the Day is set in 1956, when Stevens is
nearing retirement, its crucial events occur in the years between the
two world wars, when Stevens served as a butler to a British lord
named Darlington. The defining moment in Stevens’s career occurred
on the last evening of an important international conference at
Darlington Hall. Lord Darlington and others were orchestrating an
extremely delicate set of negotiations, aimed at persuading the
French government to lighten the sanctions imposed on Germany
after World War I.
56 D
EFINING
M
OMENTS
Stevens viewed the conference as the apex of his career. He had
spent years striving to become a great butler, an aspiration that he
defined in unambiguously ethical terms. A great butler, in his mind,
embodied the quality of dignity. And dignity represented an ethic
of self-sacrifice and noble service. A great butler devoted his entire
self to filling his professional role and performing his duties. The
butler did so in the service of a morally good master, which Stevens
believed Darlington to be. And the master, in turn, had to be devoted
to some larger cause—in this case, humane treatment for the van-
quished and impoverished Germans. At one point, Stevens says, ‘‘My
vocation will not be fulfilled until I have done all I can to see his
lordship through the great tasks he has set for himself.’’
By the final evening of the conference, there had been some
progress. The French representative seemed open minded about the
proposals under discussion. Stevens knew this and felt deeply proud
of his contribution to these developments. For years, he had trained
the large staff of Darlington Hall for such an event. For weeks before
the conference, he had worked ceaselessly, as a ‘‘general might
prepare for battle.’’ He told the staff that ‘‘history could be made
under this roof.’’ During the conference, Stevens even found time
to provide comfort and medical attention for the French delegate,
whose feet were badly blistered. All in all, he stood at the threshold
of a resounding achievement, professionally and personally.
But Stevens’s father, who was also employed at Darlington Hall,
lay dying in a room upstairs. Earlier that day, he had suffered a
devastating stroke. Thus Stevens had to choose between sitting at
his father’s bedside and overseeing the crucial final hours of the
conference. Stevens visited his father briefly and then returned to
his professional duties.
Just after dinner, while Stevens was serving drinks to the guests,
Miss Kenton, the housekeeper at Darlington Hall, took him aside.
She told him that his father had just passed away. Miss Kenton asks
if Stevens will come upstairs. He responds that he will do so in a
few moments, adding, ‘‘You see, I know my father would have wished
me to carry on just now.’’ Later in the story, Stevens tells us, ‘‘For
all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find
I do so with a large sense of triumph.’’ He believed he had finally
Defining Moments 57
measured up to the exacting standards of service that he had set for
himself. Now, he believed, he could compare himself to the great
butlers of his era, including his own father.
There is more to this story, and we will return to it soon. At this
point, however, it is important to examine what Stevens’s decision
tells us about the revealing, testing, and shaping that are the core
elements of a defining moment. In reality, a single choice or action,
like Steven’s decision, fuses all three elements. They do not unfold,
one by one, as tidy, separate stages or discrete choices. Nevertheless,
it is valuable to look closely at each element of a defining moment.
R
EVEALING
In a variety of ways, some quite powerful, defining moments reveal.
They may surface something hidden. They can crystallize what was
fluid and unformed. They may give a sharp, clear view of something
previously obscure. In every case, however, a defining moment re-
veals something important about a person’s basic values and about
his or her abiding commitments in life.
Chester Barnard held this view. His years of business experience
led him to conclude that the moral codes of a typical manager were
‘‘ingrained in him by causes, forces, experiences, which he has either
forgotten or on the whole never recognized. Just what they are, in
fact, can at best only be approximately inferred from his actions,
preferably under stress.’’
4
Defining moments compel people to ar-
range their values in single file and reveal the priorities among them.
Stevens chose to remain at the conference, rather than sit by his
father’s bedside. In doing so, he showed that he cared, first and
foremost, about his professional ideals. When he chose to carry on
with his duties after dinner, rather than go upstairs and close his
father’s eyes, he told Miss Kenton that he was doing what he believed
his father would have wished him to do. In saying this, he revealed
something more: his rationale for his values. Stevens had a personal,
carefully crafted interpretation of the lives his father and other great
butlers had lived, and he had worked fervently to join their ranks.
58 D
EFINING
M
OMENTS
Not all defining moments take precisely the same form as Ste-
vens’s. A choice may reveal little to others but a great deal to the
person who makes it. These moments of clarity are private and
personal. In other cases, a choice can reveal more to others, if they
are thoughtful and observant, than to the person who makes it.
Still other choices, like Stevens’s, reveal a good deal to others. His
decision, like the rest of his life, was exceedingly deliberate, and he
gave Miss Kenton the reason for his decision. And, in all likelihood,
staff of the house quickly learned what Stevens had done. His values
were there for the world to see.
Defining moments need not take place in a moment or a brief
episode. Stevens did have to react immediately, once he learned his
father had died. The young investment banker, Steve Lewis, had
only an hour or so to decide what to do about the St. Louis meeting.
In contrast, however, Peter Adario had several days to decide how
to resolve the conflict between Kathryn McNeil and Lisa Walters,
and Edouard Sakiz had much longer to decide how to proceed with
RU 486.
Although Stevens’s decision isn’t the template for all defining
moments, it does underscore several important aspects of these deci-
sions and what they reveal. There is, for example, no guarantee that
a defining moment will unveil a value or commitment that is morally
inspiring or elevating. Hitler, no doubt, had defining moments, as
do everyday scoundrels and humbugs. Many people react to Stevens’s
defining moment by shaking their heads in sorrow.
Moreover, what is revealed in a defining moment is rarely a
startling new facet of an individual’s personality. Long before his
choice on the final evening of the conference, Stevens had revealed
his abiding values and commitments—through innumerable acts of
scrupulous, self-effacing attention to the minute details of household
management. These brief moments of self-disclosure confirmed the
observation of Michel de Montaigne, the great French essayist of
the sixteenth century, that a single gesture, if one observed it closely
enough, could reveal a person’s entire character. Defining moments
reveal by crystallizing. They are sharper, more vivid, more intensified
versions of what a person has been revealing, usually in small ways,
almost every day.
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