Business ethicist’s ledger tallies life decisions

“One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are – your life, and nothing else.”

Inez says that in the Sartre play “No Exit,” and Laura Hartman believes it. Hartman has been nominated to hold the Grainger Chair of Business Ethics in the School of Business. And she’s premised her career – and life – on Sartre’s “summing up,” a running tally of what you’ve done with your earthly time.

“I believe you should act as if every decision you make will be the one you’re judged by,” says Hartman. Oh, say some, that’s too hard to do in business, where the bottom line might muscle ethics right off the ledger sheet.

But oh, answers Hartman, there are two bottom lines, and the other is that one “drawn neatly” under your life at any given moment. Not only that, there is room for both lines on the same ledger.

“Ethical decisions will bring profit to a business,” she says, “and crime does not pay in the long run.” In some cases, it’s downright expensive: “There are out-of-pocket costs for unethical behavior, such as the $176 million settlement against Texaco in 1997 for its lack of workforce diversity.”

Though the outcome of unethical decisions can be macro, a la Texaco, they have an exceedingly micro origin: the hearts and minds of individuals. And that’s where Hartman and her eight-week MBA module on business ethics fit in.

The class is designed to help students to define not good and bad, but an ethical process of looking at decisions. “A common reason why people make unethical decisions,” says Hartman, “is that they haven’t thought about a process before,” a way to come up with alternatives to seemingly lose-lose situations.

An example she uses in class: Let’s say you have lunch with your best friend and colleague, and she tells you she’s about to buy a new house, though it’s a stretch financially. That afternoon your boss tells you in confidence that your friend’s division will be disbanded, and everyone in it will lose their jobs.

In this dilemma of conflicting loyalties, do you call your friend, but betray your boss’s confidence? Or do you betray your friend and let her learn the bad news after she buys her house? Working through this sticky wicket in Hartman’s class can prompt a student to suggest another alternative: Go back to the boss, explain the situation you’re in, and ask for advice.

The difficulty of working with hypothetical cases is that they are, well, hypothetical. “I constantly ask myself, ‘How can I create some of the emotional despair of real-life ethical quandaries?'”

One way she tries is splitting the class into small groups, each charged with resolving an ethical question. “That setting can create emotional conflict because students have to argue over issues with people of different backgrounds and then share a grade with them,” she says.

Roiling the ethical pot in class can make things come clearer later on for students. One recently wrote Hartman about a salary negotiation in which he could have told “a little-bitty white lie” to jack up his pay. But he didn’t. “Thanks to you,” he told her, “my head is filled with ethical theory. And because of this, I told him [the negotiator] the truth – the truth!” Hartman also pours her passion for ethics into research, where she focuses on employee privacy – an airy abstraction that can be pulled down to real-life ground zero in terribly concrete ways. In addition to research on employee privacy, Hartman helps corporations write privacy policies on use of the Internet and e-mail.

Another Hartman study has begun to delineate differences between what she calls ethical and “ethically neutral” CEOs. She’s found that ethical leaders have a long-term focus, are people-oriented, and elicit pride and emulation among their employees. In contrast, ethically neutral CEOs have a short-term outlook, are self-centered, and elicit fear and confusion.

Hartman is working with faculty to integrate ethics into the entire MBA curriculum, a move supported by the American Association of Colleges and Schools of Business. That will place UW–Madison among only a handful of business schools where ethics is integrated into the curriculum. Beyond the Business School, Hartman will reach out this year on a local-to-global scale. On campus she wants to set up some roundtable discussions for those who share an interest in ethics issues. And internationally she’ll serve as secretary of the Society for Business Ethics, an association of academic ethicists and business practitioners; she’ll become president of the group in 2003.

The route to academe for Hartman ran through the land of law. After majoring in social psychology at Tufts University, she earned a J.D. degree from the University of Chicago. But when she began practicing law in Chicago, she felt frustrated with the glacial pace of a typical case. So she joined the business faculty at DePaul University, holding the Wicklander Chair in Professional Ethics.

“I was drawn to teaching,” says Hartman, “because of the exponential good it can do. You can teach a person how to look at ethics, and that person goes out and tells others.”

The wellsprings of her personal ethics include Judaism and Native American philosophy. “Native American values are very congruent with Judaism in their respect for every living thing,” says Hartman. A “healing wand” hangs on her office wall, given to her by a medicine woman of the Oglala Sioux, the people to which her roommate at Tufts belonged.

Different cultures are present in Hartman’s own family. She is Jewish; her husband, David Hartman, is gentile; and one of their children, Emma, 3, is an African-American. They also have another daughter, Rachel, 1. As a mother, wife and professor, Hartman feels – down deep in her bones – that she’s accountable for her place on earth. “If you can do some good,” she says, “then you have to do it.”