Managing in the Gray
58
Look Past the Stakeholders
What about thinking in terms of duties to stakeholders? This
is the conventional alternative to a sharp focus on returns to
shareholders. This view says that, when you make important
decisions, you should be responsive to the interests of outside
groups, and not just shareholders.
20
Typically, these groups
are an organization’s customers or clients, employees, suppli-
ers, government regulators, and the communities where the
organization operates.
Is stakeholder analysis the right way for managers to grasp
their basic duties? The answer is a qualified no. The stake-
holder view is valuable and important. It is a strong, practical
antidote to narrow preoccupation with profits. It tells manag-
ers to think carefully, responsibly, and strategically about all the
groups with a stake in what they do. It also pushes managers
to develop sound plans for managing relationships with these
groups. But stakeholder analysis has two serious problems.
First, it is too general. Telling you to pay attention to your
duties to stakeholders isn’t telling you very much. It doesn’t
tell you which groups have the highest priority or what duties
managers and companies have to these high-priority groups.
Stakeholder analysis can point you in the right direction—it
says to take a hard look at important outside groups, understand
their interests, their power, and your responsibilities to them—
but it doesn’t tell you what stakes or whose stakes really matter.
The second problem is that, because stakeholder analysis
is general, it creates a serious temptation: to focus on larger,
established, familiar groups, especially if they have polit-
ical or economic clout. This isn’t the textbook approach to
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What Are My Core Obligations?
59
stakeholder analysis, but it is a real-world hazard. The risk
was encapsulated in a classic line from the film Casablanca:
“Round up the usual suspects.”
21
And Aaron Feuerstein may
have fallen into this trap. He focused so heavily on the imme-
diate interests of visible, familiar stakeholders, with whom
he had a long working relationship, that he failed to consider
his longer-term duties to them. He took care of the current
workforce at Malden Mills, but only on a short-term basis.
No one represented the many workers—at Malden Mills,
elsewhere in the United States, and even around the world—
who might have benefited, in the long run, if Feuerstein had
been willing to rethink and restructure Malden Mills and
thereby provide sustainable jobs for years to come.
By focusing on established groups, managers may overlook
long-term opportunities. They can also miss serious duties to
groups that have been marginalized or lack political clout.
And they are more likely to be attentive to groups that want
to preserve the past rather than shape the future. The title of
a recent book—The Future and Its Enemies—highlights this
problem. Its basic question is: Who represents the future?
Who represents the interests of groups that are tiny or yet
to form?
22
Established industries and companies have many
friends in the political capitals of the world; new entrepre-
neurial companies usually don’t.
23
Fortunately, Jim Mullen avoided the hazards of stake-
holder analysis. Many different groups had a stake in his
decisions about Tysabri. So should Mullen have “rounded
up the usual suspects” and developed a plan that served the
interests of his company’s shareholders, its employees, local
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Managing in the Gray
60
communities, patients, doctors, and regulatory agencies in
many countries? Or should he have focused sharply on his
duties to a single group, the patients now taking Tysabri?
Mullen didn’t ignore Biogen’s stakeholder groups, but he
focused sharply on the company’s clear, fundamental human
duty to Tysabri patients. This duty dominated obligations to
other groups with a stake of some sort in his company.
Awaken Your Moral Imagination
When you face a particular gray area problem, how do you
know what your core human obligations are? And how do
you figure out what they mean in this particular situation?
The answer, in short, is that you have to rely on your moral
imagination.
The idea of a moral imagination is unfamiliar nowadays,
but it has a long and impressive legacy. In its simplest form,
your moral imagination is a kind of voice. In certain situa-
tions, it tells you, sometimes urgently, that something is seri-
ously wrong, you can’t ignore it, and you have to act. President
Truman was exercising his moral imagination when he said,
“I can’t stand the thought of killing all those kids” and then
restricted further use of the atomic bomb.
To see what moral imagination means in concrete terms,
recall the gray area decision described in the first chapter,
involving the long-term employee whose work had slipped
badly. This situation is a disguised version of actual events, so
I will call the employee Kathy Thompson and her boss Alisha
Wilson. The managers Wilson worked with and supervised
were really frustrated with Thompson. Most of them wanted
to hand the situation off to HR, with the expectation that
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What Are My Core Obligations?
61
Thompson would be terminated. Wilson was deeply reluc-
tant to do this. She felt that the assistant was struggling with
serious physical or emotional problems. At one point, Wilson
said, “I was really afraid Kathy could end up living on the
street.”
When Wilson made that statement, she was expressing
what her moral imagination had told her. Wilson was saying
that she and her management team, who had worked with
Thompson for years, owed her special concern and special
treatment. Wilson believed and felt that they had a serious
obligation, as human beings, to do more than put Thompson
into the HR system for termination and get her a severance
payment and a letter of reference.
More than two centuries ago, the British statesman, his-
torian, and philosopher Edmund Burke gave the classic
definition of the moral imagination: it is a reaction to a situ-
ation that “the heart owns and the understanding ratifies.”
24
Burke’s words exactly describe Alisha Wilson’s reaction to
Kathy Thompson’s situation. It was a fusion of feeling and
thinking, of heart and mind. Wilson’s heart—her instinctive
reaction as a human being—told her she had serious respon-
sibility for another person’s welfare. She saw and feared the
prospect of Thompson “living on the streets.” When Wilson
thought about this, she understood it was a real possibility,
because her assistant’s problem seemed so profound. Wilson
thought that she and the managers who worked for her had
a special obligation, as human beings, to Thompson, who
was not only their long-term employee, but also a friend.
In Burke’s words, Wilson’s understanding ratified what her
heart owned.
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Managing in the Gray
62
What kinds of situations trigger our moral imagination?
There is no comprehensive answer to this question but, in
many cases, like those involving Alisha Wilson and Jim
Mullen, two basic human obligations are at stake.
The first centers on the basic human right to live with-
out needless danger, pain, and suffering. The primacy of this
right is clear. At bottom, its rationale has nothing to do with
political documents or philosophical arguments. Instead,
it rests on a humanist perspective—that is, on a broad and
empathic understanding of human experience that tells us
certain things are wrong and we are bound to try hard to
keep them from happening to our fellow human beings.
What are these things? Stuart Hampshire, an important,
contemporary moral philosopher, wrote, “There is nothing
mysterious or ‘subjective’ or culture-bound in the great evils
of human experience, re-affirmed in every age and in every
written history and in every tragedy and fiction: murder and
the destruction of life, imprisonment, enslavement, starva-
tion, poverty, physical pain and torture, homelessness, friend-
lessness. That these great evils are to be averted is the constant
presupposition of moral arguments at all times and in all
places . . . ”
25
Put differently, we all have a fundamental right
not to have our lives taken or wrecked. This means managers
have a profound human duty not to seriously impair or risk
the lives of others.
The other frequent trigger of our moral imagination
involves situations in which people are not being treated with
the respect and dignity that, as human beings, they deserve.
26
This obligation, as we have seen, has deep roots in religious
traditions around the world. It is also embedded in the basic
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