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Truth Is a Process
T
HIS CHAPTER EXAMINES DEFINING MOMENTS
for organiza-
tions. It presents guidance for managers who want to handle
these situations practically and responsibly. Before turning
to this guidance, however, it is important to know what happened
to Peter Adario when he tried to resolve the issue of Kathryn
McNeil’s schedule.
Remember that Adario viewed this as an ethical issue, a conflict
of right versus right. As a manager, he was pulled in two directions.
Some of his responsibilities and values led him to conclude that it
would be wrong to fire McNeil. Others told him she had to be
replaced because her work was falling behind schedule. The prob-
lem required immediate attention, because Lisa Walters was pressur-
ing Adario to fire McNeil. Adario also needed a creative solution,
because there were no spare funds to hire another assistant for
McNeil and no way to reassign her.
Adario got a large cup of coffee, closed his door, and resolved
to find an answer before turning to his other work for the day. He
soon found himself thinking about a case study from his MBA days,
12 years earlier. It described the 1982 decision by James Burke,
the chairman of Johnson & Johnson, to pull all containers of Tylenol
85
86 D
EFINING
M
OMENTS
capsules, with a retail value of $100 million, from the nation’s
shelves, after six people in the Chicago area died from taking
poisoned Tylenol capsules. Burke’s decision was a defining moment
for Johnson & Johnson. It revealed, tested, and renewed the
company’s commitment to its ethical values and its corporate
credo.
Adario admired Burke’s decision and wanted to follow his exam-
ple, albeit on a modest scale. Specifically, he hoped to use the
McNeil issue to send two clear messages. He wanted to show the
managers working for him how difficult decisions could be made
with more thought and sensitivity, instead of the bulldozing style
prevalent at Sayer MicroWorld. He was also eager to take a tangible
step in the direction of a family-friendly workplace.
By the time Adario finished his coffee, he had a plan. He would
arrange to meet with Walters and McNeil in the next day or two
and tell them to hammer out an agreement before the end of the
meeting. If that failed, Adario would step in with suggestions.
McNeil’s work had to get done and done on time—the IBM account
was simply too important. But perhaps McNeil could take some
work home or telecommute; perhaps she could work all day,
every other Saturday; perhaps, he hoped, the real issue was
some misunderstanding between the two women, which the
company’s pressure-cooker atmosphere had intensified. Perhaps
all they needed was a chance to vent their feelings and hear
each other’s concerns.
Adario sent email messages to Walters and McNeil and then
left his office to make a presentation at a trade show. As he drove
away, Adario felt good about his plan. In personal terms, he was
pleased he wasn’t taking the easy way out. Unlike the boss who
had fired his next-door neighbor, Adario was going the extra mile
to save McNeil’s job. He also felt he was standing up for some of
his basic values, such as treating people decently, and was even
doing something for McNeil’s son. He looked forward to telling
his wife what he had done.
Adario also thought his plan made good managerial sense. By
letting Walters and McNeil work out a solution, he would avoid
being heavy-handed or manipulative—they would ‘‘own’’ their plan,
Truth Is a Process 87
thereby making it more likely to succeed. By getting personally
involved and helping McNeil, Adario was showing that he cared
about the people in his unit. And, in his mind, the tactic of keeping
everyone at the table until they had all agreed on a plan would
remind everyone of the urgency of the company’s situation.
Adario’s presentation went well, as did a long lunch meeting
with an important retailer. For the first time in several weeks,
Adario was having a good day, and he felt he deserved it. Even the
paperwork waiting on his desk didn’t dismay him. Unfortunately,
however, as soon as he returned to his office, he learned that McNeil
had been fired.
Walters, it turned out, had been discussing the situation with
several other managers, including a senior vice president, who had
offered to help her fire McNeil. When McNeil walked into her
office early that afternoon, she found Walters and the vice president
waiting for her. They immediately handed her a letter of termina-
tion, which said she was not ‘‘a good fit with the management staff.’’
McNeil was told to spend the rest of the afternoon bringing her
replacement up to speed. (Walters had reassigned someone from
another area and also volunteered to help out.) McNeil was told to
collect her last paycheck and two weeks of severance pay, pack her
personal belongings, turn in her ID badge, and leave the premises.
This episode had become a defining moment for Adario’s unit,
but hardly the one he had planned. Two signals had been sent:
one clear and one garbled. The clear message was ‘‘Families are an
impediment to the efficient operation of this company.’’ The other
message was either ‘‘It’s okay to go around your boss’’ or ‘‘It’s okay
to go around Adario.’’ Faced with a right-versus-right choice, he
had ended up with neither ‘‘right.’’ His intentions were admirable,
but his effort to shape his organization’s values had gone badly
awry.
Adario had started out well. He recognized that this episode
could be a defining moment for his organization and that it could
provide part of the answer to the questions Who are we? and What
do we stand for? Adario was also thinking in practical terms—about
the values he wanted to guide his department and the messages
that his decisions and actions might send.
88 D
EFINING
M
OMENTS
But events turned out badly. The reason, in part, was that Adario
drew the wrong lessons—simple, inspirational, ‘‘do-the-right-thing’’
lessons—from the Tylenol episode. As a result, he overestimated
the role of good intentions and lofty ethical sentiments in defining
moments. He also underestimated the role of management skill
and effort, as well as shrewdness and street smarts. He thought he
could accomplish, in one fell swoop, a task that demanded months
of astute effort.
Adario also failed to think through his answers to four questions
that the ethical realists might have posed, questions that can raise
the odds that managers will succeed in using important decisions
as defining moments for their organizations. Had Adario addressed
these questions, he would also have understood why the task of
defining or redefining an organization’s values is one of the most
subtle and demanding challenges of managerial work.
T
HE
C
ONTEST OF
I
NTERPRETATIONS
Some of the most valuable, down-to-earth guidance for Peter Adario
would have come from an unlikely source, a man who was born into
a literary family, spent his entire career as a Harvard professor, never
managed a company, never wrote about business, and dismissed the
world of commerce as ‘‘mere trade.’’
1
That man is William James.
Trained as a medical doctor, he became renowned as a psychologist,
a student of religion, and a philosopher. Indeed, he helped found
and popularize the school of thought called pragmatism. And it is
James’s pragmatic, psychologically realistic way of thinking about
the age-old question What is truth? that is exceedingly relevant to
managers like Peter Adario.
In his book Pragmatism, William James uses a peculiar phrase to
summarize the first lesson Adario needed to learn. There he wrote,
‘‘The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.’’
2
James
believed there was no such thing as ‘‘Truth independent; truth that
we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need.’’
3
At first
glance, this sounds like an idea that is at once both silly and danger-
ous. It seems to dismiss even the possibility of truth, thereby dis-
Truth Is a Process 89
carding reality, science, and objectivity. At the same time, James’s
idea threatens to open the door to madmen and tyrants, who will
define truth in whatever way pleases them. But none of this is
what sober, serious, practical-minded William James had in mind.
In playing down ‘‘the facts’’ and stressing the malleability of ‘‘the
truth,’’ he was arguing that we inevitably see ‘‘the facts’’ through our
interpretive lenses.
Recall Antigone and Creon. Both were citizens of the same city,
both knew its laws and religion, both had lived through the same
bloody civil war. Yet they interpreted the shared facts of their
community and its religious life in diametrically and tragically differ-
ent ways. Recall the butler Stevens. He viewed his master as a high-
minded diplomat, as did many political leaders; others saw only a
Nazi dupe. Consider our daily experience. Companies regularly
release financial data, accompanied by their interpretation of it, and
then financial analysts develop their own interpretations of whether
companies are really doing well or not. Politicians compete at ‘‘spin,’’
and we interpret their interpretations. And, of course, Peter Adario
and Lisa Walters looked at the same facts about Kathryn McNeil
and reached very different conclusions.
The point is not that facts do not matter, or that nothing is true
or false. The German writer Goethe wrote that ‘‘Experience is only
half of experience.’’ The other half is the multitude of ways in which
people perceive, weight, simplify, and explain experience—in a
word, how they interpret it. Of course, there are facts and they
matter, but we surround them, overlay them, and suffuse them with
interpretation. ‘‘All our formulas,’’ James writes, ‘‘have a human twist.’’
4
The conventional wisdom about Johnson & Johnson and the
1982 Tylenol episode is a triumph of interpretation. For 15 years,
Johnson & Johnson has reposed on a pedestal, in the media and in
business ethics classrooms, as a result of the Tylenol episode. But
this was hardly inevitable, for the story of Johnson & Johnson, its
credo, and its values lends itself to more than one interpretation.
In the early 1980s, for example, the company was widely criticized
for its delay in recalling its highly successful painkiller Zomax, which
was implicated in at least 14 deaths. One of Johnson & Johnson’s
directors of regulatory affairs commented, ‘‘We resisted too much
and waited too long.’’ Where, one might ask, was the company
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