6D
EFINING
M
OMENTS
thing.’’ These speeches serve a useful purpose. They are usually
sincere, some are genuinely inspiring, and they may even keep some
employees on the straight and narrow.
But the inspirational approach offers little help with serious con-
flicts of responsibility. The truly difficult question is the one that
Barnard and Sartre raise: What to do when one clear right thing
must be left undone in order to do another or when doing the right
thing requires doing something wrong? For managers, these problems
are especially complex. Their right-versus-right problems typically
involve choices between two or more courses of action, each of
which is a complicated bundle of ethical responsibilities, personal
commitments, moral hazards, and practical ...