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.