Whistleblowers and Regret

Whistleblowers and Regret

There’s a lot not to like about being a whistleblower.  Some, like Mark Whitaker who disclosed price-fixing by food company Archer Daniels Midland, say they would not do it again.  Part of Whitaker’s problem was he embezzled millions from the company and spent nine years in prison for it.   But most – 90% in one study – don’t regret their actions.  I don’t regret blowing the whistle on HomeFirst Services of Santa Clara County even though I lost my job as a result.

Regret is tricky.  As Bernard Williams discussed in Moral Luck, regretting one’s action comes well after the act itself.  Whitaker was gung-ho in 1992 when he informed the FBI and during the next three years as he wore a wire to gather evidence against ADM.  By 1998 when he was sentenced he had surely lost his enthusiasm.

Williams distinguishes regret for an act we commit from that for an event we are not responsible for.  It’s a matter of perspective. 

Say a man drives his truck down a residential street after having a beer with lunch.  A child jumps out between two parked cars and his struck by his vehicle.  As observers, we are saddened by the incident and regret that it occurred.  But our regret pales by comparison with that of the parents who loved the child and feel guilt for letting her play as she did.  Perhaps worst of all is the remorse of the driver responsible for the accident.  But if he denies his liability – he is a big man who can drink a beer with no effect on his driving abilities – and blames it on chance, the child, and the poor parenting she received, his regret becomes almost like that of any by-stander.

Like observers of the truck accident, all community members might deplore the violations we disclose.  Sometimes they do.  Edward Snowden’s disclosures generated public ire and sparked political action that is one hoped-for product of regret.  Whitaker’s led to $400 million in fines levied on ADM.  After I made my disclosures about HomeFirst, though, few showed any interest in the matters.

Early writers, like Sissela Bok, thought the whistleblower should lament having betrayed her team loyalty, but most of us figure the organization that retaliates against us has much more to apologize for. 

We might regret the way we conducted ourselves at the company.  This is common.  Nancy Mendoca was a caregiver at Rescare, in California.  She recorded in a logbook that a patient was left in unsanitary conditions.  She and her supervisor argued about it.  She called State regulators, which investigated and issued a citation to the facility.  After that Mendoca got into another argument with her boss.  It can drive you crazy when the company doesn’t change the misbehavior we point out.  She behaved very disrespectfully, the company said, and she was fired.  She lost her whistleblower complaint.  She might regret her words, but she probably thinks her boss had it coming.

While I was CFO at HomeFirst, I began identifying possible violations in July 2013 and kept finding more problems until I was fired in June 2014.  During that time I became increasingly impatient that little was being done to correct the problems.  I got more frustrated when I was excluded from management discussions.  Like Mendoca, I was probably disrespectful.  I admit calling my boss “a piece of work” and a liar didn’t help my case.  Even though I felt justified, I can regret that, I guess.

There are many other things we might wish had been different.  I can regret ever getting involved in that hot mess of a company in the first place or that I didn’t leave after the inept, new CEO was hired.  I can say next time I’ll wait until after I retire to do my disclosing.  Like most whistleblowers, I would have preferred not to lose my job.  And not to hire that worthless attorney.  And not to worry so much about the repercussions when I was there and about fighting it all when I wasn’t anymore.  I’m sad that friends didn’t support me as I’d hoped.  Poor me.

But my whistleblowing project, I don’t regret that.

While constant fretting can be a stressor, some think regret can help us make sense of our lives and avoid future mistakes.  Despite those potential benefits, we are reluctant to regret our ventures.  I can understand that.  There is no great logic to our exposure of wrongdoing: it’s mostly about power and not a world we’re trying to improve.  Our decision to disclose matters is driven first by the same emotions that are likely to lead us in an unproductive direction the next time around.

The main thing we learn in whistleblowing is to avoid it in the future.  Generally the only ones who repeat are serial whistleblowers in the business of filing False Claims Act lawsuits.

I took one additional lesson from my experience.  I stopped trusting government offices.  And I decided most nonprofits, like HomeFirst, cannot be trusted.  I have no faith in Downtown Streets Team, which pays its “volunteer” workers $5/hour.  I objected, but no one cared.  Still, I volunteer help for DST’s food closet program, where I enjoy the clients and fellow volunteers. 

I find my hands are dirty, too.  I put up with it for now.  But I am jaded.  I used to give money to companies I worked for and believed in, HomeFirst included.  I don’t anymore.  I wish things were different, but that’s how it is.

Whistleblowing and Moral Luck

Whistleblowing and Moral Luck

When we launch our whistleblowing projects, we’re sure we are in the right.  Sometimes the facts are not entirely clear, but we are confident that we should make our disclosures.  We decide we are just doing our jobs or what needs to be done.  Often, though, the morality of our act is determined by forces outside our control.

Bernard Williams tells the story of a man he calls Gauguin.  Gauguin got it into his head he wanted to be a great painter and the way to do that was to leave his family and move to Tahiti.  He clearly broke a moral rule by abandoning his wife and children.  Many would contend he behaved unethically regardless of his ultimate artistic accomplishments.   From Gauguin’s perspective, if he succeeds, he might conclude his action was justified.  If he fails, though, he has no defense against his critics.  The morality of his act is measured, in part, based on the results of his efforts. 

Whistleblowers are like Williams’ Gauguin.  We clearly breach our duty to be loyal to employer and peers when we blow the whistle on perceived misdeeds.  Some people will always believe we could have corrected the wrong in other ways.  Our reputation is highest when our accusations are proven accurate. 

Although whistleblower protection laws seldom demand we report actual violations, authorities favor the employers when our complaints are unfounded.  California law is clear enough, for example, but in my case the State accepted HomeFirst Services’ claim that legal bodies didn’t believe my accusations of its misdeeds and judged against me.

Unconcerned by future possibilities, many praise our desire to do the right thing.  But they ignore how intentions are often corrupted by selfish motives.  We may seek revenge or hope to win some reward.  Our patience may have run out for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with ethics.  As Jonathon Haidt contends, highfalutin morals are most often after-the-act rationalizations.

Williams argues that Gauguin’s stated intent cannot be sufficient either.  Otherwise any cockamamie idea would justify the dreamer who ignores his proper obligations.  What happens afterward is an important test.

According to Williams, our moral standing, like Gauguin’s, depends on chance factors.  This moral luck comes in two forms.  The first is intrinsic to the actor: fortune bestows on us talents, circumstances, and past experiences.  Gauguin’s opportunity for redemption after his boorish behavior depends on whether he really is an artistic genius, something no one would know for years after his decision.

Some whistleblowers attribute their courage to personal histories.  They point to long-held religious conviction, upbringing, or training they chanced to have.  But these histories diminish our individual freedom more than they empower us to decide.  Iris Murdock claimed the business of choosing is over by the time we have a choice to make.  And C. Frederick Alford described the “choiceless choice” of many whistleblowers.  It’s a decision they felt forced to make: they could not have lived with themselves if they stayed silent.

A second sort of luck is extrinsic.  It involves future events that the individual cannot control.  If Gauguin’s ship were to sink or if he were injured or sickened, and his project failed, we would conclude he was wrong to have tried.  We might judge him still more harshly if he never caught the interest of a capable art dealer and his paintings crumbed away in a sandy hut. 

We whistleblowers like to think that our moral status is immune to vagaries of luck.  We throw Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale, and Reality Winner into the same moral pot.  Each revealed classified information the public deserved to know, we figure.  But the quality of our disclosures – the vigor of Snowden’s vs. the impotence of Winner’s, for example – does, and should, have an impact on how we are considered.  Snowden referred to this retrospective evaluation when he described his greatest fear: that his disclosures would have no impact. 

The vast majority of whistleblowers and their disclosures are met with indifference.  It’s easy to feel their complaints are nothing to get worked up about.  Do we not know already that companies cut corners and cheat their customers?  That nonprofits fleece their funders while accomplishing little of what they promise?  That officials withhold information to protect the influence of their governments?  And that religious ministers are more willing to protect themselves and their institutions than their flocks?

The consequence of our ineffectiveness and others’ apathy to our cause is we gain nothing to outweigh the wrong we commit at the start of our projects.

Maybe that is okay.  Whistleblowers should be open to the prospect that our loss is not just the result of a tactical error, power imbalance, or corruption in the opposing side.  Losing may prove our moral failure: we may have been ethically flawed from the beginning.

This is not to support anyone we perceive to be doing wrong.  And those who retaliate against us are clearly sleazebags of the worst sort.

We can, though, find a kind of liberation in sloughing off the cloak of assumed moral greatness.  We can stop reliving a battle lost times over.  We can stop defending our decisions that didn’t work out.  Then we can live again and enter the next fight fresh.

Thoughts on Whistleblowing Talent

Thoughts on Whistleblowing Talent

I’m a small-time whistleblower.  So I have to admit: we whistleblowers often lack real talent.  Sometimes we should just give it up.

A recent “This American Life” episode – I’m on TV?? – reminds me of this reality.  Producer Lina Minitzis considers the case of Harley Ott who once hoped for a starring role in the musical “Annie.”

As a child Minitzis wanted more than anything to perform in musicals.  She sang and danced along with CDs of musicals.  She posted on her bedroom walls pictures of Ethel Merman and Bernadette Peters.  She tried out at auditions.  And she watched a 1997 Barbara Walters special on the nationwide search for a new star for “Annie” which was returning to Broadway.

Harley Ott was one among thousands of contestants. With her wavy red hair and chubby cheeks, she looked perfect for the role.  But when her turn came to sing, she couldn’t do it.  She said she got scared sometimes.  The director still loved her and told her to sit with him, watch, and calm down. 

She got another shot in the finals.  Again, she sounded terrible.  Later she got a third chance to overcome her nervousness, not for the role of Annie but for another orphan girl.  When the director called her name, though, she could not be found.  Stage fright, Walters concluded.  It happens to even the most promising.  Poignant.

Twenty plus years later, Minitzi decided to find Ott and ask what happened.  Ott agreed to talk about the incident.  She says it wasn’t about stage fright that day.  She just can’t sing.  She has no pitch, she says.  Being there was no fun.  It was not right for her so she left.

It seems natural to have a childhood dream and then, after being smacked down by reality, abandon it or shift to a new, good-enough dream.  When I was young I wanted to be a pro golfer.  That didn’t work out.  I hoped to be an architect but couldn’t do that either.  Eventually I found I was good enough at finance to earn an enjoyable living.

Our dreams are often inspired by what we see others succeed at.  We too would like some of the praise or money they earn.  That also goes for whistleblowing.  Especially when we hope to protect society against wrongdoing.

For some people, whistleblowing is mostly about recovering what belongs to them (like overtime pay or job safety) or getting a reward for catching a bad guy (from tipping off the IRS or winning a false claims act lawsuit).  Those of us who disclose suspected violations of legal or ethical rules risk trying something we don’t have the talent for.  C. Fred Alford says we are moved by our “moral narcissism.”

When I complained about possible violations by HomeFirst Services, I probably should have known two important things.  First, HomeFirst was unlikely to change its ways.  And second, the authorities were not going to care about such small matters.  At the start, my attorney asked hopefully whether I could prove the company had defrauded the government.  If I had more talent for the game and could have done that, maybe he would have worked harder on my case.

Some other better known whistleblowers have lacked talent, too.  Take Reality Winner.  She got it into her head that the government wasn’t admitting evidence of Russian election interference.  Like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, she released classified information.  She used The Intercept, but it burned her.  The government released ample information soon enough anyway.  She got 5 years for her crime, and the more talented Mr. Snowden condemned her sentence from Russia.

After Harley Ott walked out of the New York audition hall, she went on to become a successful child actor.  Winner and I should also have walked away from our projects or, at least, come up with different approaches to them.  We could have done better, and the world would have been just fine. 

Whistleblowers and Authority

Whistleblowers and Authority

I started writing down thoughts on whistleblowing more than five years ago.  During that time I sent off more than 100 reports and follow-ups on complaints to authorities about possible violations by HomeFirst Services of Santa Clara County.  In 2014 I made my retaliation complaint to the California Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), which I trusted would protect me.  My perspective on authority has shifted since then.

Of the news articles I’ve collected on 1,000+ cases, the most interesting for me are those that reveal something about the intentions of the whistleblowers.  But because the majority are public employees or plaintiffs in false claims act suits, they don’t always seem relevant to my own dispute with a non-profit. 

A couple of years ago I began asking to see DIR’s rulings (“determination letters”) on whistleblowers’ retaliation complaints.  I received copies of some from 2014, 2015, and 2016 and nearly all rulings from 2017.  My requests have yielded letters for more than 500 whistleblower cases.  About 80% of those claimants lost, including me.

I have tried to categorize these cases.  They are split about 50-50, men and women.  Most involve wage issues: not being paid overtime, not being paid on time, or not receiving meal/rest breaks.  Wage-related complainants win much more often than people like me who identify possible other legal violations by their employers.  Companies usually claim the whistleblowers were fired because they did their jobs poorly or were belligerent or nasty to be around.  They were disgruntled employees whom the companies needed to eliminate.

Reading the letters and grouping the cases involves a tedious process of typing data into spreadsheets.  The excitement level changed, though, when I came to my own ruling. 

DIR deputy labor commissioner Eleanor Adams, who researched my complaint, recommended a ruling in my favor.  After sitting on her report for a year, regional manager Joan Healy decided HomeFirst won.  By that time I was 3½ half years into retirement.  Her decision was disappointing but not earth shattering for me. 

I was shocked, though, that Healy had got so much wrong in her letter.  Simple facts like who was on the audit committee and what my responsibilities were.  Slightly more complicated facts like whether the disclosures identified actual or plausible violations.  Still trickier issues like exactly what I said and when.

Most annoying was how Healy ignored email evidence showing the Board decided to fire me for insubordination just a few hours after I admitted reporting potential violations.  DIR clearly heard HomeFirst’s story but not mine.  Healy’s letter even used some of HomeFirst’s phrasings: “you would not or could not execute key aspects of the CFO position” echoed HomeFirst’s statement to a possible mediator.

In Healy’s telling, I was a complete jerk.  Maybe I was, or maybe I just responded to an unacceptable situation. 

Hundreds of other whistleblowers have suffered far greater pains.  This is no call for sympathetic tears.  Instead it’s a suggestion that rulings are made unfairly each year against hundreds of individuals who register legitimate complaints.  It warns that stories we read about others may be incomplete, or even untrue.

It’s hard to know for sure, though.  Heather Boshears joined the County of Alameda (Calif.) as Principal Auditor after getting a finance degree and nine years later a law degree.  Her tasks included several quarterly audits and the annual treasury audit.  When asked to sign the completed audits, she pointed out that although she was a CPA she was not legally authorized to attest to the reports.  Discussions ensued.

Then she found the County was misusing a fee in violation of State law.  She recommended the money be refunded to the proper account.  A couple of months later she was told she was no longer needed.

Despite her prior good performance reviews, the County had lots of good reasons to fire her, it said.  She had exceeded her authority, used poor judgment, failed to work collaboratively with County managers, and lacked leadership and communication skills.  Besides, her disclosure of the problems wasn’t “protected” because it was part of her job.  DIR agreed the disclosures had nothing to do with her being let go.  Based on the letter, a reader might conclude the County was justified.

But if you’ve been through this process, maybe you think differently.  Perhaps the authority here skipped over some relevant information in the 3½ years it took to come to its conclusion.  If you’ve read a lot of these letters and are aware of the poor odds on winning a whistleblower complaint, you might abandon hope.  You could conclude authorities systematically stop short of granting the justice we expect.

It’s a common feeling, this distrust of those who have special knowledge and sit in judgment on the rest of us.  William Davies has written (here and here) about a decades long decline in our trust of elites. 

In part, that distrust has been earned, he says.  Elites promised that global trade would make us richer, but only the elites seemed to benefit.  They forecast benefits from new technologies, but too many people lost out.  Down this path, we see how powerful companies defraud.  We watch politicians lie and self-deal, and we read biased media reports.  Science is uncertain except for padding the bank accounts of the scientists themselves.

In this setting, the lies and reprehensible behavior of a Donald Trump can be ignored because he is no worse than anyone else.  Climate change can be denied because opinions differ.  It is dangerous ground.

Davies argues that a new regime is emerging from this distrust.  In it, truth is presumed hidden in archives of data.  It is revealed not by DIR or any other authority.  Rather it is exposed by whistleblowers and others who are not content with the conventional story or satisfied with the experts.

In such a world, I think, we cannot count on authorities to determine what has occurred or to justify our actions.  We can only expose what we find and then try to move on. 

Boshears was selected as Super Lawyer Rising Star in 2017-19.  She seems to have continued her life and work despite Alameda County’s action and DIR’s decision.  Often whistleblowers are known as much for the retaliation they suffer as for the good they accomplish with their disclosures.  We might do better to praise guerrilla tactics for whistleblowing: disclose the information and then exit.  The organization is unlikely to change anyway.

Whistleblowing and Justice

Whistleblowing and Justice

We whistleblowers seek justice.  The wrongs we disclose may affect only us, or they may affect many others as well.  When we file our retaliation complaints, we seek a very personal sort of justice.

Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), describes a legal system trying to do what is right.  In Doing Justice he says we need diligent, honest investigation of possible crimes.  Accusations of legal violations based on hard evidence and the likelihood of being successful at trial.  Fair and unbiased judgment.  And punishment that is reasonable, provides retribution when appropriate, and promises to protect society in the future.

In a smaller domain, the State of California’s Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) attempts to do justice for those who file whistleblower complaints, like mine in 2014.  The DIR produces the determination letter that we complainants receive.  In it, findings and conclusions are laid out.  Occasionally an employer is punished. 

Those determinations[1] in 2017 included a personal victory for Reda Kolta.  Kolta was Assistant Manager at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco.  He complained about long hours and overtime and threatened to go to the Labor Commissioner’s Office.  Three weeks later the hotel fired him.  It claimed he was rude to a hotel guest and botched a banquet room setup.  The DIR investigated.  It interviewed witnesses and decided that the hotel’s criticisms of Kolta were merely pretexts for firing him because of his wage complaints.  After reviewing the case for four years, it ordered the hotel to pay him $69,446 to replace wages he lost while looking for a new job.  It charged the hotel a $10,000 civil penalty.  Justice was done.

Robert Zolensky II had a different experience.  He worked as a paramedic at different companies in northern California and Nevada.  When interviewing for a flight paramedic position at American Medflight, he said he was a volunteer firefighter and might need to leave on short notice if called.  No problem, they said.  Anyway, California law protects the jobs of employees who are called to emergency firefighting duty.

After about a year on the job, Zolensky told management about some potentially unsafe flight events.  After investigating, the company decided his report was exaggerated and inaccurate.  He complained to DIR about retaliation, and an investigation ensued.  That took three years.  The company said he was disruptive and his behavior was inappropriate.  But his pay wasn’t changed, and he wasn’t fired.  Two weeks after the incident he quit.  No retaliation there.  He didn’t offer evidence to rebut the company, DIR said.  So it dismissed his complaint.  Again, it appears justice was done even if Zolensky got nothing from it.

This is how things go for most who file whistleblower complaints with the DIR.  From 2013 to 2017, DIR decided in favor of the only 21% of the complainants.  And in just 26% of closed cases did accusers receive any benefit at all (via determinations or settlements).

Zolensky, though, went further than most of us.  In March 2016, 21 months after complaining to DIR and 17 months before the DIR letter, he filed a lawsuit against American Medflight.  In it, he described more retaliation, including intentionally inflicted emotional distress, than DIR saw.  He didn’t abandon his job, as DIR accepted.  He had to fulfill his volunteer firefighter duty, and the company wouldn’t let him go until he found a replacement.  That refusal might have violated state law.  The company disagrees, but DIR skipped over the issue.

When we lose our cases we question the process and the people involved.  The attorneys we hire and the bureaucrats who pass judgment are doubted.

Bharara is most confident that justice can be done when he praises his staff in SDNY.  They are smart, dedicated, honest, unassuming, likable, energetic, overworked, and blunt in a no-nonsense way.  The best of them believe in the virtue of work.  They don’t take shortcuts, toot their own horns, or blame others for failures.  They work as hard and run as fast to exonerate the innocent as to convict the guilty.  They go out of their way to get to the truth. 

(On the other hand, whistleblowers are snitches.  Tattling is not attractive.  It’s a betrayal, he says.)

He becomes testy, though, when he discusses their failure to convict any of the bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crash.  There wasn’t the hard evidence they needed to convict anyone, he says.  No politics were involved.  How could there be, with such straight arrow agents in charge?  What unclean motivations could they have? 

We’re asked to take Bharara’s confidence in his staff on faith.  If we do, people who lost homes and jobs in the crash have no gripe to make, or none worth hearing.

Reports of nepotism and retaliation against its own whistleblowers suggest that Bharara’s boy and girl scouts are not running the DIR.  Our trust wanes.  We don’t know if DIR intentionally ignored information in Zolensky’s case.  Or if information from his lawsuit would have changed the result. 

After DIR considered my allegations against HomeFirst Services, it agreed with the company no one retaliated against me.  It didn’t mention emails in which Board members decided to fire me, at first for insubordination, eight hours after I admitted reporting two possible violations.  Or an email the next day relating advice from counsel to come up with a better reason than insubordination.  Within two weeks of my disclosure, the CEO and Board had worked out a plan to fire me.  None of that got into the DIR report.

We don’t know whether DIR omits others’ evidence, too.  We can’t be sure if justice is denied as a result.  It sure seems we cannot count on the DIR, or government in general, to reliably hear what we have to say.  And, unlike a Snowden or Ellsberg, small-time whistleblowers seldom attract media attention for even part of our projects.  We carry on our fight for so long and without an audience[2].  It can be hard.

We can’t put stock in the law to provide the kind of justice we seek.  It will help some –20% to 25% of us, say – but we will always be responsible for our own lives. 

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[1] Following my public records request the DIR sent me copies of their letters in 278 cases, including mine.  It reported having made 333 determinations and received 2,022 whistleblower retaliation complaints in 2017.  Of those determinations, 65 favored the complainants.

[2] Cf. Stauffer, Jill.  Ethical Loneliness.  New York: Columbia University Press.  2015.

Whistleblowers Remain Right

Whistleblowers Remain Right

Whistleblowers are right making in their allegations.  I was.  I think others are, too.  But outsiders can come to different conclusions.

After Attorney General Barr released his letter on the Mueller investigation, David Brooks at the New York Times wrote about our craziness on the subject of President Trump. 

Over the past two years, many people on the left have stood up and denounced collusion by Trump and his allies with the Russians.  They called him out as a traitor.  They risked retaliation by the party in power for their accusations.

During the same period, many on the right have denounced the Mueller investigation.  The claim of collusion was all a hoax, they said.  Worse, it posed the threat of a coup against a legitimately elected government, according to them.  Lefties mocked them and their fantasies.

Now that the investigation is done, evidence of collusion by the Trump administration didn’t prove criminality beyond a reasonable doubt.  Mueller’s work, however, led to charges against 37 defendants, including 6 Trump associates.  Brooks says both sides should take a breath.  They should see this as an opportunity to show some humility.  Maybe some should even apologize for their heated comments.

But, Brooks warns, scandals like this are a mainstay of current political life.  They are the bases for our competing senses of superiority.

The same thing goes for organizational life witnessed by whistleblowers.

After none of my many allegations of misconduct by HomeFirst Services stuck, I never saw reason to apologize for bringing them up.  It seemed to me that I had every right to challenge them although that triggered HomeFirst’s decision to fire me.  So I did.

HomeFirst Board members were stalwart in their defense of the CEO’s handling of possible violations.  They called me Mr. Bleak for my repeated warnings that the company could run out of money in the coming months.  When they needed a bail-out from Santa Clara County (Calif.) to cover payroll, no one called to thank me for the heads up.

Once whistleblowers lose their cases, they usually vanish from view.  Excepting some big names like Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden and a few smaller players who hang on.  Some flog their cases in the courts beyond what good sense explains – Robert Purcell stayed at it for 18 years.  Others, like Jessie Guitron, periodically float into interviews years after being fired.  For the rest, media indifference keeps private how they adapt to losing.

The organizations are more likely to justify themselves publicly.  Wells Fargo, Guitron’s former employer, was hit by fines, subjected to nasty publicity, and lost two CEOs, and it says it has transformed itself. Transformation, though, did not include apologizing to Guitron or the hundreds of others it retaliated against.

It’s hard to know when you should give up a strongly held conviction.   That’s true for whistleblowers at each stage of their projects – when they first see a wrong, when they tell their bosses, when they report it internally and then externally.  It’s equally true for their organizations and for both critics and supporters of the President.

In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, Margareta Magnusson guides readers through discarding the physical accumulations of their lives.  She encourages us to give things up to simplify our living, to move what we don’t need to better homes, and to make it easier for others when we die.

I heeded her advice first in my kitchen.  I tossed spices unused for years and foods with best-used-by dates in 2012.  I set in the compost bin soba noodles, tiny black lentils, colorful dry beans I’d been given years ago, and an expired cheese making kit.  The resulting cupboards appeared to belong to a less interesting person, I’m afraid.

That is part of the problem with giving up our opinions, even after they are shown to be faulty or unproductive.  Without them, we can be seen as less vital, less significant, and less alive. 

Sometimes it just feels better to keep flogging our case.  I kept reporting new problems at HomeFirst even after it was obvious the CEO and Board would do nothing about them.  I fight now to give up thinking that Trump did indeed collude with the Russians.

Whistleblowing Need Not Be Great

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.