What Can I Live With?
141
to work hard on implementation. You may also find that
your decision isn’t “final.” Gray areas are uncharted terrain,
so you shouldn’t be surprised to encounter resistance, sur-
prises, disappointments, and unexpected opportunities. You
may also find that your “final” decision needs adjustment
or even significant changes, once the implementation starts.
And, despite your best efforts, you may find that you need
to continue hammering away to communicate your decision
clearly. It is often very difficult to get a clear signal through
the ambient noise inside organizations.
Most important, once you have resolved one gray area
issue, you have to get ready to handle the next one—and
the one after that—because gray area decisions are the core
of management work. When Jim Mullen reflected on the
Tysabri episode, he said, “All the stuff that’s black and white
already gets decided before it comes to the CEO. If the black-
and-white stuff arrives in my office, there’s something wrong
with the organization. What arrives in my office is all the
gray stuff.”
22
Mullen is saying that, once you become a manager, the
messy, high-stakes problems become a central part of your
job. And, when you go home after work, you don’t escape the
challenge of gray areas. Men and women who take on real
responsibility, at work or elsewhere in life, find there is no
way to dispel all the gray. This is why the five questions are
so important. They are a valuable toolkit for the times when
you face a hard decision, but they are important in another,
deeper way. The five questions, taken together, offer a basic
philosophy or worldview to men and women who take their
responsibilities seriously.
Chapter_06.indd 141 11/06/16 2:28 AM
Managing in the Gray
142
Ethically Sensitive Pragmatism
This book has sketched what could be called a working phi-
losophy for managers, based on five important humanist
perspectives. This philosophy doesn’t consist of abstract con-
cepts or binding principles. It is a disposition, an attitude, a
habit of mind, and an implicit worldview. It is a distinctive
way of sizing up gray area issues, analyzing them carefully,
grappling with their full, human complexity, and then—and
only then—making final decisions. This worldview says, in
essence, that successful, responsible leaders are ethically sen-
sitive pragmatists. This view of management can be summa-
rized in two simple statements.
First, managers facing hard problems have to be sensitive to a
range of fundamental human concerns—about consequences
for other people, about their basic duties, about the hard reali-
ties of getting things done, about constitutive community val-
ues, and about what really matters to them personally. These
fundamental concerns are ethics in its fullest sense. We often
think about ethics in terms of do’s and don’ts, but the five ques-
tions raise deeper concerns. They are profound ways of asking
what really matters in life, in communities, and in decisions.
The working philosophy presented in this book doesn’t
enshrine any of the questions or claim that one dominates the
others. Nor does it dismiss these perspectives because none of
them provides ultimate answers. Ethically sensitive pragma-
tism sees the ideas underlying each of the five questions as
valuable windows on human complexity. This is why lead-
ers who follow this approach work hard to be sensitive and
Chapter_06.indd 142 11/06/16 2:28 AM
What Can I Live With?
143
responsive to a range of fundamental human considerations.
The British explorer, linguist, and polymath Richard Francis
Burton was a practical man with a poetic gift. He captured
this first aspect of ethically sensitive pragmatism when he
wrote, “All faith is false, all faith is true: truth is the shattered
mirror strewn in myriad bits; while each believes his own lit-
tle bit the whole to own.”
23
Ethical sensitivity accepts and respects the many ways in
which human intelligence, imagination, and experience have
tried to understand how to make complex, uncertain decisions
in the right way. As a working philosophy, ethically sensitive
pragmatism means grappling with the varied, inevitable, and
deep complexities—technical, human, social, and moral—of
gray area decisions. This is why sensitivity, awareness, flexi-
bility, and responsiveness are so important to this view of
the world.
The second basic statement that describes ethically sensitive
pragmatism says that, as a manager, you have work to do.
You have to resolve gray area issues in ways that are realistic
and practical. This means getting the process right—when
you approach the problem as a manager and when you ulti-
mately resolve it as a human being. But process has to end.
At some point, you have to say to others, clearly and plainly:
“This is my decision, this is why I made it, and this is what we
are going to do.” Doing this well means following the long-
standing practical guidance embedded in the five questions:
looking broadly and deeply, awakening your moral imagina-
tion and relying on it, testing your plans and yourself for resil-
ience against surprises and politics, and really understanding
the stories that give meaning to your organization.
Chapter_06.indd 143 11/06/16 2:28 AM
Managing in the Gray
144
Of course, the conventional wisdom says that a pragmatic,
get-the-job-done approach undermines sensitivity to serious
human concerns. And this is often true. Pragmatism can
simply mean putting on blinders and setting the ethical nice-
ties aside. But ethically sensitive pragmatists approach this
challenge differently. They work hard and often struggle to
find ways through gray areas that work for their organiza-
tions, their teams, and themselves and, at the same time, are
sensitive to serious human concerns.
Ethically sensitive pragmatists accept complexity, ethical
and practical. They also embrace this complexity—not because
this makes decisions easier, but because it makes them better.
They believe that, by putting decisions in their full, realistic,
human context, they raise the chances they will really under-
stand what is at stake when they face hard decisions and will
then have the right foundation for making good decisions.
This was one of the critical lessons that David Lilienthal,
one of the most widely experienced and successful executives
of the last century, drew from his career. During the 1930s,
Lilienthal helped design and then led the Tennessee Valley
Authority when it was constructing a vast, multistate net-
work of dams and electrical infrastructure. In the 1940s, he
helped create and then ran the Atomic Energy Commission,
at a time when this new technology promised to transform
human life and threatened to extinguish it. Then, during the
1950s, Lilienthal founded an engineering consulting firm.
For decades, Lilienthal kept a detailed diary in which he
reflected on his work and his life. Late in his career, Lilienthal
looked back at his wide experience and summarized his view
of managers’ work. “The managerial life,” he wrote, “is the
Chapter_06.indd 144 11/06/16 2:28 AM
What Can I Live With?
145
broadest, the most demanding, and by all odds the most com-
prehensive and subtle of all human activities.”
24
For Lilienthal, management was a way of life, not just a
job or career. And successful management was, as he saw it,
a “humanist art.”
25
This is why responsible managers should
work hard to make sure that, when they face hard, complex
issues, their decisions rest on the deep-sunk pylons of conse-
quences, basic duties, practical realities, defining community
values—and on their abiding, personal sense of what really
matters in life.
Chapter_06.indd 145 11/06/16 2:28 AM
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.