Managing in the Gray
100
The Network of Mutuality
If managers ignore their constitutive relationships when they
face hard decisions, they are not only rejecting parts of them-
selves. They are also rejecting a long-standing perspective on
our common human experience. Over the centuries, the idea
that human nature is profoundly social has taken many differ-
ent forms. The sacred Hindu text, the Upanishads, explains
this perspective with a simple metaphor. It says, “As all the
spokes are fastened to the hub and the rim of a wheel, so to
one’s self are fastened all beings, all the gods, all the worlds,
all the breaths, and all these bodies.”
8
In the West, Aristotle’s
succinct and famous statement of this perspective was his
definition of human beings as political or social animals.
9
During the Middle Ages, the Western tradition trans-
formed this idea into a worldview called “the great chain of
being.” It said the universe was organized like a vast corpo-
rate organization chart. God presided over ranks of angels.
Below them, on earth, were kings, then other royalty, then
other strata of society. Further down, in the underworld,
there was Satan who presided over the ranks of fallen angels.
This way of thinking—the view that all life or all human-
ity and perhaps all of reality is deeply one—began to recede
during the Renaissance and, for many people, the emergence
of modern science made it to a charming metaphor rather
than a description of reality.
And yet the idea of some vast, encompassing “we” remains
powerful, and we often hear variations on this theme. Martin
Luther King Jr., for example, composed a beautiful, lyrical
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Who Are We?
101
version of the idea. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King
wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutu-
ality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
10
Most religions
today accept some version of the idea King expressed, and so
do atheists.
11
Albert Einstein, for example, wrote, “It seems
to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological
concept which I cannot take seriously . . . Science has been
charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust.
A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sym-
pathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis
is necessary.”
12
In fact, a scientific perspective can reinforce the idea of
deep human bonds. Evolutionary theory treats human beings
as just another of the species that originated when a lightning
bolt or a lava flow heated a pool of carbon-based muck and
somehow produced molecules that replicated, survived, and
evolved. Yet even from this perspective, the notion of deep
psychological and emotional bonds—largely unconscious,
pervasive and powerful—remains plausible.
We have already noted that our ancient ancestors were the
creatures that were more sensitive to relationships and more
inclined to collaborate and hence had a better chance of sur-
viving and passing along their genes.
13
But evidence of many
kinds suggests we are profoundly social beings. For exam-
ple, anthropologists and others have studied the occasional
reports of so-called feral children—who were raised by bears
or other animals and, for years, had no human contact. Once
they were found, these children had serious difficulty learn-
ing language and showed little interest in other people; some
even had trouble learning to walk upright.
14
These reports, as
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Managing in the Gray
102
well as psychological studies of abandoned children raised in
abusive institutional settings, point to the same conclusion as
evolutionary science: from our earliest years and at the level
of basic brain structure and development, we are relational
beings.
In short, a wide range of long-standing scientific, philo-
sophical, and religious perspectives all point us to the same
conclusion. When we make hard decisions, we need to pay
close and sensitive attention to our defining relationships
and to the values and norms they create and support. Our
decisions should recognize, in the words of sociologist Philip
Selznick, that “in the beginning is society, not the individ-
ual.”
15
This means looking closely at the norms and values of
the organizations and communities around us and trying to
discern what they mean for gray area problems.
But how? To answer this question, we will look closely
at a hard gray area problem that confronted the CEO of
a major company. This incident shows the practical chal-
lenges of answering the fourth question, and it will also help
illustrate important practical guidelines for meeting these
challenges.
The Practical Challenges
In November 2007, a photographer snapped a painful pho-
tograph of Jerry Yang, the CEO and cofounder of Yahoo!.
Yang was testifying before a US congressional committee
about his company’s role in the arrest of Shi Tao, a Chinese
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Who Are We?
103
journalist and dissident. In Western eyes, Shi Tao’s offense
was inconsequential; but, after a quick, secret trial, he was
sentenced to ten years in prison. The photograph captured
the moment when Yang turned around and faced Shi Tao’s
parents, who were sitting in the spectators’ gallery immedi-
ately behind him. Yang’s face seemed to be filled with sorrow,
remorse, and shame.
His reaction may well have reflected a sense that he and
his company had violated values and ignored relationships
that were central to his life and to Yahoo!’s identity. Yang,
his family, and the company he helped create had eagerly
embraced and benefited from the American ethos of free-
dom, opportunity, and individual liberty. Yang’s parents
were Chinese, and his mother had brought him to the United
States when he was ten years old. When he arrived, the only
English word he knew was “shoe.” He later reflected, “We
got made fun of a lot at first. I didn’t even know who the
faces were on the paper money.” Within three years, however,
Yang was fluent in English. He excelled in high school and
was working on his doctorate at Stanford University when he
and Jerry Filo created a simple internet list of their favorite
websites and circulated it to their friends. Within a few years,
this part-time project had evolved into Yahoo!, a multibil-
lion-dollar company. Now, because of the Shi Tao situation,
Yang and his company were being excoriated—by custom-
ers, human rights organizations, the media, and members of
Congress.
The Shi Tao incident originated in the early 2000s. Like
many other Western companies, Yahoo! had begun building
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Managing in the Gray
104
major operations in China. As a condition of doing business
there, these companies agreed to follow China’s laws and
regulations restricting freedom of speech. Then, in 2005, Shi
Tao used his Yahoo! e-mail account to send a document to
Western reporters that described Chinese government restric-
tions on media coverage of the anniversary of the Tiananmen
Square protests. This document had been widely circulated
among Chinese media organizations and was hardly a high-
level state secret. Police officers representing Chinese state
security went to a Yahoo! office, met with the office manager,
and presented official documents requesting the name asso-
ciated with the e-mail account. The office manager provided
Shi Tao’s name. He was arrested immediately and, within
months, sentenced to prison.
What does the Yahoo! situation tell us about the practical
challenges of using the fourth question—Who are we?—for
resolving gray area problems? Basically, it reveals three seri-
ous issues. The first is that managers and their companies
have many relationships and hence are committed to a wide
range of values and norms. So how do they decide which
relationships and which norms and values matter most in
a particular situation? Should you focus primarily on the
values and norms of your team, your entire organization,
your local communities, or, in the Yahoo! case, your home
country? And what about the norms and values that really
matter in your personal or family life or, if you are religious,
in your faith community?
The second problem is deciding what to do when some
of your values and norms seem to contradict others. For
example, at the time of the Shi Tao incident, Yahoo! was
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