Virtu, Virtue, and Success 119
At other times, a person must do something wrong, such as engaging
in deception, in order to meet an important ethical obligation. Suc-
cess and virtu sometimes demand what virtue discourages. This is
why the veteran leader in Dirty Hands asked, ‘‘Do you think you can
govern innocently?’’
In fact, the problem runs even deeper. Virtue and virtu are not
simply alternative toolkits that managers can take off the shelf and
use depending on the circumstances. Aristotle and Machiavelli would
agree that they should be, and typically are, character traits, not
tactics. A young person—Steve Lewis, for example—chooses a pro-
fession. To succeed, as we have seen, he must concentrate his
energies, hone particular skills, intensify specific elements of his
personality, and think about people and situations in certain ways.
Gaining power and responsibility in an organization requires a sus-
tained effort. Leading, changing, and defending an organization
demand and instill particular ways of seeing the world and shaping
it. A profession becomes a way of life. It demands certain virtues,
risks certain vices, and shapes people in particular ways.
Sakiz’s career definitely suggests this conclusion. Did he plan
each of the steps described in this chapter? Did he dispassionately
calculate the odds of each scenario? Was he the grand, far-sighted
puppeteer for whom everyone else danced? Of course not. According
to press accounts, Sakiz struggled with the decisions, and the anxiety
he felt apparently brimmed over at his press conferences. But his
life seems to have prepared him to operate instinctively and shrewdly,
to muddle and maneuver roughly forward, in exceedingly complex
circumstances. Born of Armenian parents in Turkey, Sakiz immi-
grated to France, where he trained as a scientist and doctor, and
then managed a complex company, owned partly by the French
government and a huge German conglomerate and linked through
strategic alliance to several other large organizations. In all likeli-
hood, this background prepared him to guide his company responsi-
bly and pragmatically through the vortex of the abortion debate.
For well or ill, the RU 486 episode revealed and tested the person
Sakiz had become through the career he had chosen and the life
he had lived.
There is no final reconciliation of virtue and virtu. They remain
in permanent tension. Managers live and work in two worlds simulta-
120 D
EFINING
M
OMENTS
neously. One is a web of responsibilities, commitments, and ethical
aspirations. The best guides to this world are the search for balance
and the practice of virtue. The other world is an arena of intense,
sometimes brutal competition. Here success demands virtu.
Often the tensions between these worlds lie dormant. Then man-
agers can simply go about their business. When the tensions erupt,
however, in the form of acute conflicts and painful choices, they
can exact an awful toll. This is why Abraham Lincoln aged so
dramatically during the Civil War years. It is why Chester Barnard
used the phrase ‘‘moral destruction’’ to describe how moral conflicts
affect executives.
These crucial choices, however painful, do have another side.
They are defining moments, in which organizations and their leaders
reveal their abiding commitments, test the strength of their ideals,
and shape their character. These moments demand creativity, persis-
tence, courage, restraint, shrewdness, and fairness. They demand
the capacity to work and live with the inescapable tension between
virtue and virtu.
As such, these situations are moments of potential greatness. At
least this was the conviction of the ethical realist who has remained
silent throughout this chapter. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that ‘‘the
greatest perhaps also possess great virtues, but in that case also their
opposites. I believe that it is precisely through the presence of
opposites and the feelings they occasion that the great man, the bow
with great tension, develops.’’
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