Again, Words Fail Me

It probably won’t come as any surprise to my readers (assuming I have readers) that the most common “tag” on this blog is the “Stupidity” tag, which appears at the bottom of 248 of our 865 posts to date – or more than a third of them when you discount the 200 or so Ethics and Grad School Diaries posts. One of my primary research interests remains Institutional Failure, and specifically the ways in which otherwise capable people keep destroying otherwise sound companies, which means that I spend a lot of my time reading about business failures that by all rights should not have been failures. I know that not all of these tags are fairly applied – there are things that appear stupid to me after more than 20 years in business and two Master’s degrees in Management that might not be obvious to someone without that experience or training. And yet, I can’t help thinking that a reasonably intelligent eight-year-old could explain to you why asking someone where and when they had been Saved during a job interview would be a bad idea…

If you missed it you can pick up the original story from the ABC News page, but the basic idea is that a man applied for a job with a company in Tulsa, Oklahoma and was asked not only where he went to church, but whether he was “born again,” all of the churches he had ever attended, where an when he had been “saved,” and whether he would have a problem with reporting early for work each morning without pay in order to participate in Bible study class. When the man told the interviewer that he was a single parent and therefore couldn’t attend church on Sundays (what with having small children to take care of and all) the interviewer became “agitated,” and the interview ended shortly thereafter. It goes without saying that the hero of our story didn’t get the job; you could probably also figure that he is now suing for discrimination on the basis of religion under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Naturally, the company is insisting that no such discrimination took place, and they merely went with the more qualified applicant…

The thing that struck me about the story was that even leaving aside the social, legal, and financial aspects of this case that are completely asinine, this doesn’t even make sense in a religious context. Let us suppose that the company’s mission statement and religious beliefs are exactly as stated; that they use the proceeds from their business to further their evangelical ministries and convert as many of the heathen as they possibly can. That being the case, the success or failure of their business quite literally impacts the number of people whose mortal souls they can save. Would they not, in that case, have a responsibility to run the business as efficiently and effectively as humanly possible? Hiring a good Christian (whatever that might mean to the owners of this company) would at most enrich one single person who is already among their “saved” elect, while hiring a person who can do a better job would allow them to extend their ministry to more people and save more of them…

I kid, of course, but my point is quite serious. In most companies, the greater good to be served by the success of the enterprise is the quality of life of the employees and the communities they support, the success of the stockholders, and the well-being of all of the other stakeholders connected with the business. Failure of the enterprise, and particularly failure as the result of willfully idiotic management practices, is a crime against all of those people, and can ultimately destroy whole communities – or even whole national economies – just because someone is placing his or her religious bigotry ahead of the welfare of all of those people. In this case, if what the people from this allegedly deeply religious company say is true, then by their bigotry and discrimination they are not only failing their employees, their vendors, their customers, their community and their country, but also the deity they worship…

Words fail me. I’m sure that in the fullness of time something worse than this will turn up. But for the moment, this wins. This is the dumbest thing I’ve heard yet…