The Ethics of Honesty

As most regular readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) already know, I spent a number of years as a management consultant, working with small and medium-size organizations, both for-profit and non-profit, and helping new ventures to launch and existing firms to get better at whatever they were doing. Unfortunately, most people have no idea what that actually means. Even with the best of intentions, some people can’t seem to grasp that writing is different from typing, that operational analysis involves an in-depth examination of a firm’s activities and comparison to the rest of their industry, or that what I do requires years of experience and training. As a result, a lot of people apparently believe that I can take a brief look at what they are working on and somehow just know whether their idea will work, and what efforts will be required to make that happen, without any particular effort. Although it would seem that some of them also believe that the same functions could be handled by any bum from off the street – or a particularly bright two-year-old…

It’s a peculiar situation, in which people who would never consider asking for a free ride from a taxi driver or a free cake from a baker, or even for free legal advice from a lawyer, will assume that despite the fact that they have not the slightest idea what I do, it must be easy (and require no time at all). From time to time someone will call me up and ask me to read over their plans for a new venture of some kind and tell them what I think of the project, assuring me that this will “just take a minute” and that no one else can help them with it. The question at this point isn’t so much whether or not I should do it (I really shouldn’t, but no one is going to understand that, either), as it is what do I tell them. This is especially true when the concept I’m looking at is so deeply flawed that I can see multiple ways in which it could get the idea person behind it divorced, savagely beaten, publicly ridiculed, or completed bankrupted if they even admit to originating the idea…

On the one hand, I’m not actually the world’s expert on anything. I’m a competent, capable analyst with a lot of experience both operational and consulting in a wide range of industries, but that hardly makes me the final authority on every conceivable type of new venture. If I give a valuable idea a hearty thumbs-down there’s a real chance my “client” could give up on something that could make the world a better place. On the other hand, five years with a consulting firm, two more with the Small Business Administration (through the Small Business Development Centers program) and several additional years freelance, not to mention two Master’s Degrees in Business and 20 years in Corporate America means that I’m not exactly Captain Kangaroo, either. If an idea is flawed enough that I can spot major problems with it in a cursory reading, that probably means that it needs further development before the entrepreneur proceeds with his or her business plan. The issue then becomes, what do I tell them?

An idea that someone has nurtured for years is a deeply personal thing. Frequently, it’s the one brilliant idea that they are sure will catapult them to the big time without needing any of the tedious intervening steps; their generation’s answer to Microsoft Windows, or Facebook, or sliced bread. In other cases, it’s their personal vision of a better world to come; the Utopia that could exist if only people were willing to let go of their blindness and pre-conceived notions and listen. In either case, crushing that person’s hopes and dreams seems heartless – except when we consider that aforementioned divorce, ruin, grievous bodily injury and/or public humiliation, in which case failing to point out those critical flaws would be far worse…

So you tell me: what is the ethical choice here, for me – or any other management professional in an analogous situation? Should we fulfill our obligation to the client as we would with any other customer and tell them the bald truth, even though they are friends and/or family and our answer will have difficult emotional freighting? Should we refuse to take any case with a personal connection, the way a doctor or a lawyer might, knowing that our friend/relative would never be able to afford a professional analyst of reasonable quality, and our refusal could doom the project right off the bat? Should we try to divert the client into additional research and/or development when we know their idea will never fly and there is next to no chance they can find a fix for any of its problems? Do we attempt to point them toward existing ventures that already do something of this kind – assuming such ventures exist? Or do we tell the truth, the whole truth, openly and clearly, and let the chips fall where they may?

It’s worth thinking about…