Ethics and Leadership Lessons from the Parable of the Sadhu
This paper analyzes Bowen McCoy's "The Parable of the Sadhu," a Harvard Business Review Ethics Prize-winning essay in which McCoy recounts a real moral dilemma encountered during a Mount Everest climbing expedition. The paper examines how the discovery of a near-dying holy man forces a group of climbers — each from different organizations — to confront the tension between individual and collective moral responsibility. Drawing on McCoy's own reflections and Nassim Nicholas Taleb's concept of the "black swan," the analysis explores how goal-oriented culture can cause individuals and groups to abdicate ethical responsibility when faced with unforeseen circumstances.
- Introduction: A Moral Dilemma on Mount Everest: McCoy's prize-winning text and its backstory
- The Sadhu's Discovery and the Breakdown of Collective Responsibility: Stephen's response and the sadhu's fate
- Goal-Oriented Culture and Individual Ethics: Corporate goals versus moral duty
- The Sadhu as a Black Swan Event: Taleb's framework applied to the sadhu
- Conclusion: The Failure of Communal Effort: Three intertwined lessons from McCoy's parable
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its ethical analysis in a concrete, narrative case study, making abstract moral concepts accessible and compelling.
- It connects McCoy's autobiographical account to broader business ethics principles, demonstrating how personal experience can illuminate organizational behavior.
- The paper integrates an additional theoretical lens — Taleb's black swan concept — to deepen the analysis without overcomplicating the argument.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses close textual analysis, drawing direct quotations from McCoy's article to support each analytical claim. This technique grounds the argument in the primary source and models how to let an author's own words carry evidential weight while the writer provides interpretive commentary around them.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by contextualizing McCoy's text and its biographical background, then moves through the narrative sequence of the sadhu's discovery and the group's fragmented response. It next connects this response to the dynamics of corporate goal-setting culture, introduces Taleb's black swan framework as an additional interpretive tool, and concludes by synthesizing all three themes — unpredictability, leadership failure, and goal obsession — into a unified moral lesson about communal ethical responsibility.
Introduction: A Moral Dilemma on Mount Everest
"The 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 his 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 to climb Everest six years before, but fell ill just short of reaching the summit. In this instance, however, McCoy and 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. It is at this point that the expedition discovers the "sadhu."
The Sadhu's Discovery and the Breakdown of Collective Responsibility
A sadhu is a type of monk or religious pilgrim. This particular sadhu is discovered with almost no clothing, near death from exposure to the elements. Returning him to safety would take approximately two days of travel back down the mountain to receive appropriate medical treatment. Meanwhile, the camp is filled with tourists from around the world who have paid a premium to climb Everest and are enjoying the rare good weather that will allow them to continue 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 rather than continue upward with the expedition. This soon becomes a lesson in business ethics, however, when Stephen confesses to McCoy: "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).
Conclusion: The Failure of Communal Effort
McCoy presents this story as a "parable" — like the lessons offered by Jesus — because it requires interpretation. Is this a lesson about "black swan" events, or about leadership, or about the aggressive pursuit of goals at all costs? In some sense, it is a parable about all three of these things, because what McCoy's article underscores is the failure of communal effort when all concerned individuals are too focused on the goal rather than the process. This is perhaps the most important lesson McCoy offers.
Works Cited
McCoy, Bowen. "The Parable of the Sadhu." Harvard Business Review, September–October 1983.
Taleb, N. Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House, 2007.
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