121
6
What Can I Live
With?
The fifth question gives us the final, critical step for resolving
gray area problems—and it does this with a striking mes-
sage. It says that, no matter how hard you work, no matter
how good your analysis is, and no matter how carefully you
think about consequences, duties, practicalities, and values,
you often don’t find an answer to a gray area problem. What
do you do then? Basically, you create the answer, and you do
this by making a decision you can live with—as a manager
and as a human being. That is how you resolve a gray area
issue.
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122
What does it mean to “live with” a decision? Sometimes
it means you have to accept or tolerate a decision. You did all
you could, but you’ve only met a minimum standard of accept-
ability. Often, gray area problems don’t have win-win options.
Your job is making the least bad choice, and the “success” that
you live with is success with complications, sometimes serious
ones. In the case of Tysabri, the drug returned to the market
and alleviated a great deal of suffering, but it also risked lives.
In other cases, you work hard on your own and with others,
and you find a creative, practical approach to a gray area prob-
lem. You live with it and feel proud about it. That is how Becky
Friedman felt about her efforts with Terry Fletcher.
However, regardless of whether your decision meets a
minimal or aspirational standard, you live with your decision
on a gray area problem in a deeper way. You are account-
able—to others and to yourself—for what you decide. As a
manager, you will be held accountable—legally, organiza-
tionally, financially, and in other ways. But you will also have
serious personal responsibility for whatever you decide, and
that is the focus of the fifth question.
This responsibility runs deep. You resolve a gray area deci-
sion by saying explicitly: “This is what I have decided and
this is what we are going to do.” But that isn’t all you are
deciding. You are also deciding, inevitably, the answer to the
first four enduring questions. Your decision says—based on
your personal judgment—which consequences, duties, prag-
matic factors, and values matter most and which matter less.
And you can’t escape this responsibility. Gray area decisions
inevitably reflect and reveal the personal priorities of the per-
son who makes them.
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Because gray area decisions are yours in this personal way,
the fifth question pushes you to reflect seriously on what
you can live with. Gray area problems test competence and
character. They are intersections of work and life. To answer
them well, you have to think hard about what you really care
about, as a manager and a person, and what these convic-
tions mean for the decision you are making. Grappling with
the fifth enduring question can take real courage. A retired
senior executive, looking back at her long and successful
career, reflected, “We really want someone or some rule to
tell us what to do, but sometimes there isn’t one and you have
to decide what the most relevant rules or principles are in this
particular case. You can’t escape this responsibility.”
Fortunately, the fifth question—What can I live with?—
is old. For millennia, in both the East and the West, it has
challenged many extraordinarily thoughtful and insightful
men and women. And we can turn to them to understand,
in depth, what the question is really asking and to get some
practical guidance for answering it well. As with the previous
questions, you will see that process matters. But the process
that matters for answering the fifth question well is a process,
not with other people, but within yourself. This process con-
sists of some final steps you can take to reflect on a gray area
problem before you commit to a decision.
Character and Judgment
In the end, a manager’s character, convictions, and values
matter critically for resolving gray area problems—for
reasons that the wisest and most acute observers of the
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124
human condition have given, in various ways, over many
centuries. Their answer says, in essence, that for really hard
decisions, your judgment is the decisive factor, and judgment
reflects character. In other words, like the DNA double helix,
judgment and character are deeply intertwined.
For example, for Aristotle, the right answer to a difficult
problem was the golden mean. In other words, the best deci-
sions avoid excesses. Too much courage becomes recklessness,
too much prudence becomes cowardice, and so on. The right
approach to a problem is usually in an intermediate zone. But
where? To answer this question, Aristotle says you should first
look closely at the particular features and circumstances of a
problem: try to understand all its nooks and crevices. Then, he
says, you should rely on your judgment—on your experience,
analysis, deliberation, and intuition—to decide what is right. In
other words, the golden mean is where your judgment says it is.
As a result, different people, looking at the same problem
or situation, can make different judgments about the right
answer to a gray area problem. And Aristotle is comfortable
with this—with one critical proviso. The individuals who
make these judgments, he says, should have good character.
They should be committed to and live by the classical vir-
tues like honesty, courage, prudence, and justice. Aristotle’s
basic logic is this: character shapes judgment, and judgment
resolves hard problems. Put differently, it is judgment, shaped
by character, that says this is where we will draw the line, this
is what we will and won’t do, and this is what our organiza-
tion will pursue or reject.
1
The theme of the golden mean runs through a good deal of
classical thinking. The Buddha advocated “the middle way.”
2
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125
For Confucius, the admirable person resembles an archer who
aims for the center of the target and reflects carefully when an
arrow goes astray.
3
Maimonides warned, “If a man finds that
his nature tends or is disposed to one of these extremes . . .
he should turn back and improve, so as to walk in the way of
good people, which is the right way.”
4
Mohammed said the
best choice was “the middle ground.”
5
If we turn from classical writers to the modern era, we
find the same idea—that judgment and character are deeply
intertwined—and we find this idea in the thinking of
extraordinarily disparate individuals. For example, Friedrich
Nietzsche was a brilliant, reclusive German poet and scholar,
and one of the most influential philosophers of the modern
era. He wrote about religion, power, and human nature, and
one of his fundamental ideas was the impossibility of grasp-
ing reality. All we have, Nietzsche believed, is our own inter-
pretation of reality. As he phrased it, “‘This is my way, where
is yours’—thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For
the way—that does not exist.”
6
A variation on Nietzsche’s theme appears— astonishingly—
in the opening pages of My Years with General Motors, the
autobiography of Alfred P. Sloan. During the 1920s, Sloan
forged the modern GM from a near-bankrupt hodgepodge
of automotive companies. By the 1950s, under Sloan’s lead-
ership, GM had become the largest and most profitable
company in history. Sloan pioneered approaches to strategy,
organization, accounting, finance, and manufacturing that
were adopted by countless other companies, and continue
to shape organizations today.
7
He firmly believed in bas-
ing management decisions on facts and analysis. Yet, in his
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