Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Whistleblowers and Jumpers


Whistleblowers and Jumpers

Mike Lewis has written a book of encouragement for employees who are dissatisfied in their jobs and may hesitate to start something new: When to Jump: If the Job You Have Isn’t the Life You Want.  Lewis tells the stories of 45 people, including him, who jumped to new careers.  Results varied, but all were happy in their decisions, unlike some who plunge into whistleblowing.

A Voice

Whistleblowers and Lewis’ jumpers follow a similar path.  They begin with some dissatisfaction in their organization.  Jumpers describe an internal impulse.  For some it’s a calling, a voice, or an instinct that draws them toward something new or old.  They feel no joy in what they’re doing and believe their real passion lies elsewhere.  Or they hate being told to do one thing when all along they have wanted something different.  Whatever the impetus, a moment arrives when they know it’s time to leave, Lewis says.

For those who disclose misdeeds, motivation emerges in two phases.  First comes a personal discontent.  Maybe with a boss, an expected advancement, or pay.  Or maybe it becomes obvious a career is not going to be as great as hoped for.  For the first time they are willing to care about organizational misbehavior.

Then an external reason for revolt appears.  Something might have seemed entirely normal before, but now it offends.  Maybe the violation of some policy, law, or moral standard.  Afterward, like jumpers, they remember the incident as something that could be not ignored.  A voice, perhaps, announces the behavior is just wrong.  It must stop.

A Plan

After jumpers hear that little voice, Lewis says, the next step is to make a plan.  When Lewis planned his own jump from investment banking to playing pro squash, he saved money, recruited sponsors, and cultivated contacts.  He trained hard and developed his college level skill to that of a professional.  He entered tournaments while still working for Bain & Co.  Through all this he learned what he would face in his new life.

Whistleblowers plan for the first half of their project.  Once they observe the wrong, they start considering what to do about it.  They document the misdeed.  They study what rule is violated.  They talk with others about the problem to make sure their understanding is correct.  They calculate how best to disclose the activity internally and then externally.

Rarely, though, do whistleblowers plan for what comes next.  They do not anticipate the personal fallout from retaliation.  And they do not come close to anticipating their loss of future income.  Instead they believe the promised protections and hope for advertised rewards.  They underestimate how long the fight will take and how hard it will be to get their lives back in order.  Like Edward Snowden, they get to Hong Kong all right, but the on-going travel is problematic.

Expect Luck

When to Jump is a book of confidence-building. If you jump one way today, you can jump back or another way tomorrow.  Lewis’ own story is built around a leap into globe-trotting athletic competition, which lasted just eighteen months.  Now he has a burgeoning When to Jump business.  Things work out for jumpers.

His book is filled with bright young people who graduated from great schools, who have helpful connections, and for whom luck is built into the system.  So Lewis is probably justified in recommending his readers trust their impulses.  One interviewee, author Michael Lewis (no relation), assures us, “I knew as long as I allowed myself to be lucky, I would find some money on the ground.”
Whistleblowers traverse a different terrain.  We don’t count on luck.  We expect to succeed because we are right.

We may be uncertain whether what we’ve seen is a legal violation, but we know we have every right to call it out.  When I began disclosing the HomeFirst behavior that I thought was illegal, I recognized that some enforcement agencies might favor the company even if the offenses were obvious.  I believed the licensing, bid-collusion, and payroll tax and minimum wage issues were violations, but I was not certain.  Home First’s unjust retaliation, though, was absolutely clear to me.

While our situations differ, the thrust of Lewis’ advice applies to both jumpers and whistleblowers.  Whether making a jump to a new career or blowing a whistle, we cannot nail down every future possibility.  We cannot eliminate all uncertainty.  After we feel that first impetus and do the planning we can, it is time to act.  Maybe first in a small way, but act.

Don’t Look Back

Because our ventures are uncertain, we may not be successful in the way we first envisioned.  Lewis advises that even failure will move us closer to our ultimate goals.  We learn new skills, see new possibilities, and break free of old constraints.  The jump worked out well for him, and he encourages us to imagine the worst that can happen if we act.  It’s probably not so bad, he declares.

But that is not quite true for whistleblowers.  Sometimes whistleblowing can produce disastrous results.  Some are locked out of their careers, end their marriages, and lose their homes.  Some are threatened with jail time and financial penalties.  Outcomes can be terrible, especially if we plan poorly.

My whistleblowing at HomeFirst ended my career.  I lost maybe $50,000 in salary and legal costs.  I accomplished nothing.  But as Lewis advises, I should compare my end to what life would have been if I had not acted.  On that basis, I am satisfied enough.  I was happy to be done with people I considered deceitful and unethical.  I am relieved I rejected HomeFirst’s settlement agreement; I would have always regretted the cheap sellout and enforced silence. 

If we can limit the punishment from our losing ventures, the worst possible case may be manageable, at least for us small-time whistleblowers.  We might not achieve all we hoped for, but we will live.  We can try again if we want.

Lewis ends his book with a story: he is flying over South America on his way home at the end of his tour.  The guy next to him speaks with a cowboy accent.  Evil ain’t about murder or cheating, he advises Lewis.  True evil, he says, is when someone or someplace takes your agency.

By blowing the whistle, we may be able to hold what is truly ours.

Thursday, April 5, 2018

Whistleblowing and Morality


Whistleblowing and Morality

Whistleblowers are moral warriors, some think.  Lawyer-whistleblower Will Kramer recently argued they often feel a powerful sense of moral obligation.   Myths that they are motivated by money or they are just disgruntled employees are wrong, he wrote.  But morality is tricky.   Mostly people call something right based less on moral reasoning than on moral rationalization[1].  And whether an objection is honestly founded on moral grounds can depend on your perspective.

The Easter-Passover season brings to mind an early whistleblower: Judas Iscariot.  Judas followed Jesus of Nazareth for a couple of years through the Judean desert.  Jesus’ ideas grew increasingly at odds with Jewish tradition, from which Judas and the other disciples came.  While many early followers quit him, Judas stayed on with some reservations.  As their finance guy, he complained, for example, that money spent on Jesus should be used to assist the poor. 

According to familiar biblical reading[2], Jewish leaders decided to arrest Jesus for violating their teachings, but they needed an insider’s help.  In exchange for reward, Judas directed them to Jesus.  After the arrest, Judas was shunned and soon died.  Although his name became synonymous with traitor, his only sin may have been to defend what he considered a valued religious tradition.

This is a common whistleblower’s plight.  We convince ourselves we are doing what’s right for excellent, moral reasons, but others reject our belief.

Last month, Adrian Lamo died.  Lamo rose to fame in the hacker community for authorized and unauthorized security tests of various corporate computer networks.  His 2002 break into The New York Times got him a two-year probation sentence and a $65,000 order for restitution.  He entered a difficult period that included a psychiatric lockup and diagnosis for Asperger’s.  Then in 2010 he and Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning had a conversation.  Manning confided having downloaded 260,000 secret files and sending them to Wikileaks. 

Lamo was no innocent.  Hacking and document theft didn’t bother him, per se.  But he thought the leaks put lives at risk.  So he turned Manning in to the FBI.  He made a moral call.  He blew the whistle on a soon-to-be-famous whistleblower.  For that he was treated as most whistleblowers are: he was vilified by supporters of Manning and Wikileaks.  His tribe judged him a Judas for doing what he thought was right.

Other whistleblowers also experience this: the people she betrays claim they have greater value.  The State found harm, not good, in my whistleblowing because it supposed HomeFirst really helped the homeless.  Christians have the biggest problem with Judas.  And Lamo’s critics tend to find inherent benefit in public disclosure of confidential documents.  When Sherron Watkins brought down Enron, she was heroic because Enron was by that time regarded as scum. 

Another who turned against his clan was Christopher Wylie.  Wylie worked at Cambridge Analytica for about a year ending in 2014.  A data guy, for years he was OK with using Facebook data for political research and psychological profiling.  CA got funding from major Republican donor Robert Mercer and was co-founded by Steve Bannon.  It supported many conservative political campaigns.  Wylie was fine with that, too, at the time.  CA’s clients included Ted Cruz in 2014, maybe Brexit supporters, and then Trump in 2016.

Like Lamo, what pushed Wylie over the edge was not the work itself.  He didn’t mind grabbing personal information from 87 million people.  What bothered Wylie was its outcome: Trump won.  CA’s immorality became evident to him years after he left the company.  Only then did he conclude it was undermining democracy.  His come-lately approach to whistleblowing, however, has drawn criticism from Slate and others.

These whistleblowers are connected by two threads in their projects.  First comes the terrible difficulty in teasing out what is morally correct.  Our complaints can be technical and hard to understand.  Whether we act honorably for the right reasons is always subject to doubt. 

We necessarily offend one morality when we defend another.  One’s judgment on Judas is biased by her feelings toward Jesus.  Even a case as seemingly clear as Watkins’s becomes ambiguous when the thousands of innocent employees at Enron and Arthur Anderson, who lost their jobs, are considered.

Second, a whistleblower’s history provides ready ammunition for her attackers.  Judas is reviled as a traitor because he voluntarily followed Jesus for years.  Lamo received scorn because he was once a lauded hacker and his background led Manning to approach him.  Wylie is maligned because he happily made money on the business he now exposes. 

At HomeFirst, I was CFO for seven years, and some of its problems began years before I disclosed them.  My career made me disingenuous, HomeFirst contended, not a true whistleblower.  The State labor commission agreed with the company: I was a traitor trying to bring it down.  A Judas, I was not acting in good faith, it wrote. 

Each of us emerges from a past that endangers us.

So we whistleblowers usually lose.  That’s no reason to be silent.  Sometimes we’re so upset about our situation, we need to act.  It’s just a warning about what will probably happen when we do.



[1] Greene, Joshua D. “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul.” In Moral Psychology: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development (Volume 3).  W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. 35–80
[2] In one alternative reading, Jesus was a rebel who challenged the Roman order.  The Romans, who eventually crucified him, had good reason and authority, which the Jewish leaders lacked, to execute him.  See also this.