Whistleblowing Need Not Be Great
Jane Anne Staw’s new
book Small luxuriates in minor pleasures. The recording of one’s departed grandmother
singing a favorite song. A dried leaf seen on one’s morning walk. A
sparrow alighting on a redbud tree.
Sitting with these precious moments can fill us with life in a way that
great projects, like whistleblowing, do not.
Staw relates the story of John Marcher in Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle. Marcher expects something great to happen to
him. He feels he is being kept for
something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible. It will perhaps overwhelm him. He shares this secret with May Bartram. She understands him. She believes him, and she waits with him. Years pass, and he continues to visit his
friend. Still the momentous happening remains
in the distance. An old woman now,
Bartram dies. Marcher’s great catastrophe
never arrives. But the sweetest chance was
always at hand: their friendship which could have become more. It might have made their lives very lovely.
When we launch our whistleblowing projects we envision a
great product. Chelsea
Manning wanted to spark a national debate on the role of the military in
foreign policy. Edward
Snowden hoped to direct the attention of the American people to illegal
surveillance conducted by its government.
Michael
Cohen wants to alert Americans that President Trump is a racist, cheating
conman. My own intended audience was
smaller. I warned cities, Santa Clara County,
the State of California, and some federal agencies about HomeFirst’s
possible misdeeds.
When we blow the whistle, we place ourselves at the hub of a
great enterprise. When Michael
DiSabato made public violations by Ohio State athletic team doctor Richard
Strauss, he didn’t act just on his own account. As
a father, a citizen, and a human being with a moral compass, it was, he
said, his duty to bring this to the attention of not only his teammates but
also the university, whose values he held dear — the people, tradition,
excellence.
I think what often sets us off as whistleblowers is being
told we are not so great. We should put
our noses down and do our puny jobs, they say, and it hurts. We are disgruntled, as our employers claim in
defense of retaliations against us.
Cohen turned on the President after Trump
spurned him. I decided to blow
whistles after I became fed up with my boss, HomeFirst’s CEO Jenny Niklaus. The way she led the company into continuing
losses. The way she pushed an
unreasonable budget for the coming year.
The way she responded to my discovery of an overbilling
of Santa Clara County. The way she rejected
my advice. None of this, of course, is
earthshaking in a company.
It was obvious to HomeFirst’s development director that Niklaus
was an idiot, and he left. But I stayed,
thinking I could overcome her and turn the company around again as I
had done 5 years earlier. I would be
praised, not dismissed.
Avram Alpert, who
is, like Staw, a writing teacher, recently wrote in “The
Good-Enough Life” that our desire for greatness can limit us. The desire, though, is common. U.S. presidents, including Lyndon Johnson,
Reagan, and Trump, have called America great.
Philosophers have set standards for ethical life so high that few, if
any, can achieve.
Rather than the great life, chose a middle path, Alpert says.
That is the one more likely to give each
of us the resources needed to handle our inevitable sufferings in the world. This good-enough life embraces the ordinary,
as Staw suggests in her praise of the curled leaf she chances on.
Alpert cautions that the good-enough life is not easy to
achieve. It’s hard work to smile
patiently while suffering the routine pains of our ordinary lives. It’s not always easy to put up with
organizational inanities. Certainly not
for me: my post-MBA
career included 8 companies, 2 of which fired me.
Despite the surging popularity of mindfulness
and being
present, the advice that Staw and Alpert offer is not entirely satisfying
either. If we focus on the small
pleasures of organizational life – doing our jobs well, enjoying our
co-workers, appreciating our paychecks and well-lit environments – we can
easily become complicit in the breakdown of legal and ethical norms. Like the philosophers Karl
Marx chided, we would choose to appreciate the world in many ways while the
point is to change it.
The lesson from John Marcher, I think, is not to pretend
that we are about to accomplish something great with our whistleblowing. The odds are too much against us for that to
be the case. Still, we must act, not for
greatness but for ourselves and what it means to be alive.
