Lessons in Business Ethics From Bowen Mccoy S Parable of the Sadhu

¶ … Parable of the Sadhu" is a legendary text in business ethics -- it won the Harvard Business Review's Ethics Prize in the year of its publication. McCoy, a managing director at Morgan Stanley, writes autobiographically about a real experience during his leisure hours, but the lesson of McCoy's piece is one about the fundamental ethics of the business community. Bowen McCoy describes how he and a colleague "literally walked through a classic moral dilemma without fully thinking through the consequences" (McCoy 106).

McCoy and his friend Stephen are on a climbing expedition on Mount Everest -- crucial to the backstory is the fact that McCoy had attempted climbing Everest six years before, but fell ill just short of reaching the mountain's summit. But in this case, McCoy and his friend Stephen have made it almost all the way up the mountain, and are experiencing perfect weather -- which is not always the case on such expeditions.

In other words, a difficult but desirable goal is in sight, but at this point the expedition discovers the "sadhu." A sadhu is a type of monk or religious pilgrim, who is discovered with almost no clothing and near to death from exposure to the elements.

In this case, it would take approximately two days to get the sadhu back down the mountain to receive appropriate medical treatment, while the camp is filled with tourists from all over the globe who have paid a premium to climb Everest, and are enjoying the rare good weather which will allow them to get up to the next stage of their journey. McCoy's friend Stephen sees this situation and believes that, if the sadhu dies, the expedition will be culpable.

As a result, Stephen directs his own Sherpa guides to escort the sadhu back down to a lower camp on the mountain, rather than to continue up with the expedition. But this soon turns into a lesson in business ethics, when Stephen confesses to McCoy that "I feel that what happened with the sadhu is a good example of the breakdown between the individual ethic and the corporate ethic. No one person was willing to assume ultimate responsibility for the sadhu.

Each was willing to do his bit just so long as it was not too inconvenient. When it got to be a bother, everyone just passed the buck to someone else and took off." (McCoy 104). Of course, in this case the real issue was the goal-oriented nature of the endeavor -- a corporation or business will often place a specific goal as the highest good to which it can aspire, and also expects its individual members to valorize that goal.

The goal of climbing Everest is difficult, and this is a goal all the individuals shared. The ethical dilemma is that the party, and its individual members, do not know how to deal with the presence of an unexpected consequence -- what if pursuit of the goal permits a human being to die from neglect? To some extent, the appearance of the sadhu that far up Mount Everest is the type of event that it is not possible to foresee.

In the terms of a fashionable writer on business culture in the twenty-first century, the sadhu is similar to what N. N. Taleb calls a "black swan" -- a complete game-changing event that cannot be predicted or prepared for. This is the most crucial.