Welcome back to The Workaround. I’m Bob 👋
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I’m pretty sure everyone reading these words has been part of a company that sells something.
But have you ever thought about the ethics or morals of what you sell and who you sell to?
Of course you have! But where is your line? How did you set it? What have you turned down and feel proud of? What have you done that still sits like a splinter in the back of your conscience?
The morals of our business models might be the least discussed, yet most significant topic in business.
Most of us live in a culture where pretty much anything goes. One side of the political debate embraces complete freedom. Another side is trashing whatever we used to agree on. And many good things have come from this new openness.
Yet we lack a standard model of behavior, which helps maintain the glue of trust that enables us to work well together. Maximizing the Almighty Dollar becomes our lowest common decision-making denominator. I touched on some examples of how this is working out in my last two posts.
It’s as if we can’t even discuss holding ourselves to a higher standard.
Morals and ethics seem more like politics and religion today—topics that people don’t want to touch for fear of offending others. But how else do we learn and align without discussion and sharing?
When I discover that there’s an important topic we haven’t discussed, I tend to want to explore it even more. Maybe it’s the same rebellion gene that sent me down the entrepreneurial path.
So I’ll go first.
Do whatever you want. I won’t judge you if you won’t judge me. This is all about how we judge ourselves, anyway.
Let’s start by examining a few public examples of a company’s moral choices regarding what to sell and to whom to sell it.
The earliest example I can recall was when I started my internship at Procter & Gamble after business school. I was interning at the company during the summer between MBA classes, and I was completely new to marketing and advertising. It only took a few days to get a feel for the choices that businesses make around their products and positioning. Suddenly, I saw the advertising in the world around me in a whole new light!
One morning, I was walking through a field of parking lots on my way to my office. Beneath interstate bridges, in a rough area of town where homeless men tended to camp out, I saw a billboard for a specific brand of low-priced whiskey. The advertisement featured a new, smaller bottle and the phrase: “Easy to grip, Easy to sip.”
Now, being aware of marketing and media strategy, I could see what they did there. This 80-proof hard liquor, advertised in this low-income zip code, with a message that was just a hair away from “Fits perfectly in a paper bag!” was clearly aimed at winning over the homeless men around me who drank straight from the bottle.
I thought about the people in offices like the one I was walking toward, having conversations and making decisions that led to this billboard. Were they crafting PowerPoint decks about homeless men and growth opportunities during a recession?
Every day for three months, I looked up at that billboard, thinking about the marketing career that lay ahead for me.
Today, I still can’t help but see morally questionable products and marketing.
Recently, DoorDash partnered with Klarna to launch an “Eat Now, Pay Later” program. Finally!—If you can’t afford to pay today for your burrito and the private taxi that delivers it, you’ve now got a solution. In its efforts to gather a few more nickels, DoorDash is happy to put its customers into debt. And Klarna is eager to make every purchase a promissory note in its run toward an IPO.
Now, you can concoct a story to defend this decision. It’s legal, it’s empowering consumers, and maybe the interest rate is better than a credit card that a customer might be using anyway. But, really, do we want to help encourage debt in the world in this way?
I’d say “no.” Maybe you’d say “yes.” It doesn’t matter to me, as long as you’re paying attention. How about another test:
Top-tier consulting firm McKinsey has helped authoritarian governments enhance their global standing. This privately-held, leading institution that already pulls in billions of dollars a year, accepts money to help Russian companies under sanctions improve their strategic leverage. McKinsey assists government-owned Chinese companies in developing military installations on artificial islands in the South China Sea. And it helps Saudi Arabia identify which reporters to keep an eye on.
Until a few years ago, McKinsey didn’t do work for governments at anything close to this scale. But this group of high-income, high-status, MBA-educated partners with a bucket-load of current blue-chip clients decided that growth was paramount. Now they sell consulting services to all sides of today’s geopolitical powder keg. And they are celebrating their success at their own private version of Burning Man—in China, just a few miles from an internment camp where political prisoners are suffering in jail.
This is dark stuff! What client won’t they take at $16,000 per day?
BUT, look here ^^^, I’m just imposed my values on McKinsey. They can do anything they want, within the laws of whatever democratically elected or dictatorial leader who pays their bills. And if you read the partnership’s purpose, mission and values statement, you’ll find what truly matters to them: (1) Be professional; (2) Improve clients’ performance; and (3) Attract and retain top talent. Sure, there’s some words in the salad, such as “ethical”—but they leave that to be definied by their clients, whose Mission is theirs to serve.
Or, for a more recent startup example, there’s Inception Point AI, which plans to flood the world with fake podcast hosts and AI-generated content.
As Adam Singer shares in his damning insider analysis, this is just the latest in a growing number of AI startups aiming to siphon off traffic from people who discover this content by mistake. The podcasts are crap, but you might find them in a search—and have to absorb a full ad-load before you figure out that it’s junk.
And yet, this founder and many like her are celebrated. Just another clever hack to get that sweet payout. Never mind that millions of human podcasters are producing much better content already, because they actually care about what they do.
It’s interesting how many companies hide behind the money element of these decisions.
Some say it’s a big market and a company should participate wherever the need exists. Meanwhile, Chick-fil-A remains closed on Sundays. We don’t have to take every dollar that we can.
But this isn’t about them, it’s about YOU. It’s your business, your project, your reputation, your conscience.
And I promised I’d share my decisions…
I have to credit my parents for establishing my moral base. I didn’t grow up in a religious household, which meant we carved our own way. I recall having conversations at the family dinner table about right vs. wrong and situations that tested us. It was clear that I’d have to think for myself, and seeing my parents make wise choices under challenging situations set a positive bar.
As I mentioned above, I got my first real-world business ethics education at Procter & Gamble (P&G). From the outside, I was impressed by its trusted, premium brands that helped improve the lives of millions of people each day.
Once inside the building, I saw the company’s Purpose, Values, and Principles posted within each room, on every global campus. But we didn’t need to be reminded of them. Everyone I encountered shared a belief in doing the right thing for our consumers through our products and marketing.
I learned from our business partners, too. Walmart in particular fascinated me. The company was concerned about the potential for its buyers to be improperly influenced by us sellers, so it had a zero-gift policy. And zero really meant zero! We couldn’t buy them a cup of coffee or host them at an event without letting them pay their own way. At one point, I wanted to demo our Mr. Clean car wash kit by washing our buyer’s car, but they declined due to the gift policy.
But there’s one murky ethical situation that I still think about from those days.
During my second marketing assignment, on Tide, I led a liquid detergent upgrade project. As part of a product formula upgrade that included adding new stain-fighting ingredients, we decided to switch to a “normalized” bottle cap. Before, we had a larger cap for Tide with Bleach than regular Tide liquid. That’s because the “with bleach” meant you were adding more ingredients to the wash cycle. It would save our production process a significant amount of money to stick with one, bigger cap rather than switching them up on the lines.
A few months after this launch, we began to see a lift in our sales volume—despite a price increase that we implemented along with the formula upgrade. We were excited, but needed to uncover the true secret to our success. When all of our analysis of the advertising, pricing, upgrades, distribution, and usage was complete, we were somewhat embarrassed by the main reason for our results: people who used to fill a smaller cap now filled a larger one.
They wasted a few cents per wash, which went directly to our bottom line.
I eventually left to join my friends and fellow P&G alumni at a growing digital agency. With that high ethical experience still running in our veins, we remained committed to doing the right thing on the agency side. Yet as business owners, we had significantly more personal financial impact at stake in our decisions.
We also worked with dozens of different brands and categories, each of which has a dark side. Disposable diapers help parents care for babies, but are bad for the environment. Coca-Cola and Pringles make you smile, yet contribute to the obesity epidemic. Pharmaceuticals save lives, yet they are often little better than generic options that cost significantly less. Every product in our cabinets and refrigerators right now can kill us in some way.
The first major client-related ethical decision we faced was when an RFP came in for a massive cigarette brand. Our agency was known for its leadership in consumer relationship marketing programs—for companies like Abbott Diabetes Care. The potential client had a big points-based loyalty program and was interested in having us take it over.
This would have meant many millions of dollars a year to our company at a time when we were starting a 5-year earnout. A win would lock in at least half of our goal.
But none of us were excited about it. We gathered for our bi-monthly executive meeting and discussed whether to participate. Our group of friends could say anything to each other, so we went around the horn to weigh in. Six-for-six was thumbs down. We didn’t feel right about supporting a dangerous habit with little redeeming value. It was personal for me, as my father was hooked on and off cigarettes since his teen years.
It took ten minutes to turn this down. Then one of us suggested we look for a way to turn it into a positive story. We spent the next hour talking about how we would share our decision with the company in such a way that they would know we have ethical guardrails. Our transparency would become another way to show how we make decisions about what we sell—and what they worked on—with due consideration of impacts way beyond the bottom line.
Flash forward a few years after finishing our agency’s sale, and I was co-founder and CEO of a struggling marketing-tech startup. We were watching our bank account and employee count shrink as we tried to figure out a profitable pivot.
That’s when we got an opportunity to work with a division of Monsanto, the agricultural products giant. The company was launching a content marketing program with helpful information for family farmers, and wanted us to help with influencer and social media marketing.
Now, for me, this was a no-brainer. I knew Monsanto as the creator of several GMO products, and I believed in the science behind them. The idea of tweaking the genetics of seeds to improve yields and nutritional profiles, while reducing the need for pesticides, was something I found very positive. As a curious news consumer and technologist, I investigated the negative reports and bans, but found such claims to be overstated. Plus, humans had been tweaking the genetics of plants and animals for over 10,000 years in a very haphazard way.
But upon hearing about this opportunity, my good friend and head of marketing, “Steve,” was shocked. He couldn’t believe we would work for this company—even in a positive campaign around helping family farmers. Steve knew our dire situation, and as a good friend, I knew he was of sound mind, so I listened to his argument against GMOs.
And I disagreed with him. However, I wanted to build a company where people could both weigh in on such decisions and opt out if they didn’t feel comfortable doing the work. So in an all-hands meeting, I shared my decision as CEO, how and why I made it, and that no one would be forced to work on this client.
A year later, I was tested again when one of our sellers told me she got a call from a former client who had gone over to work on the JUUL brand of e-cigarettes. The client was hoping to run influencer marketing campaigns targeting a young adult consumer.
That was a quick, hard pass. Again, it was a product I didn’t want to help promote. Some other company took this assignment. It didn’t end well.
That’s the responsibility and privilege you have as the CEO: You get to flex your ethics and do what you think is right.
I saw a CEO go in the other direction when our startup was acquired in 2018. We became part of a company that was a leader in digital coupons.
I recall sitting in a meeting with the top leaders of the sales team one Friday afternoon. The head of the retail partnerships division got on the line, excited to share the news that our CEO had changed his mind about marketing cigarettes, after more than a decade of ruling against it. His change of heart was driven by our opportunity to win business with a leading convenience store chain. Ironically, we were also in the final stages of pitching for more business with CVS, which had recently decided to stop selling cigarettes altogether.
I sat on the call, wondering how this decision was made and what the 1,000 employees in the company might think about it. Not one to hold back, I brought this up. And the rest of the group basically laughed me off the call.
It was clear that they hadn’t really thought about questions like this before, and certainly didn’t want to now. I found that sad.
For those who pay attention to Substack post subtitles, this might be what you were waiting for…
It’s April 2022, and I’m working through our startup’s 4th pivot in five years.
After selling our last company, a small group of us wanted to keep working together. But we struggled to find product-market fit with our HR-tech idea. Eventually, we decided to pivot the business into a tech-enabled recruiting agency. My job, again, is to rustle up some clients.
For the first time in my life, at age 50, I find myself writing copy and setting up workflows for a mass email marketing campaign. It’s one of the most frustrating tasks you can have—feeding the beast with multi-layered messages, while tiptoeing through the Google anti-spam minefield.
But I’m having some luck targeting customers of a competing service that was going out of business. I check my email one day and find a positive reply from a company called “TechMedia, LLC.” A young recruiter, Krista, liked my pitch and wanted to set up a Zoom to learn more. I try to conduct some advanced research, but this company appears to invest in other, unnamed websites and has just a few dozen employees in the L.A. area.
I did learn from her LinkedIn profile that Krista was originally from Ukraine, and at the start of the call, I make a point of telling her I hope her family was OK. Russia invaded just two months earlier.
She thanks me for my concern, then tells me that their business is a holding company for adult websites.
Usually, I would spend the first 10 minutes of every pitch asking some questions about the client’s business, their use of recruiters in the past, and why she replied to my email among the hundreds in her inbox. But hearing “adult websites” threw me for a loop. I mean, I think that’s what she said, but she has an accent, and I never imagined a young woman working in recruiting at an adult-tech company.
I revert to the safety of my well-worn slides and proceed to walk through our founding story, tech approach, and fee structure. I make a point to hit heavily on the fact that we mainly source software developers in the Midwest, who are more loyal and more affordable than what they find in the L.A. tech scene. I get to the end, and she asks:
“Is your company OK working with adult websites? I know people in the Midwest can be more conservative…We’d need to make sure they are open to working on our app, or we are wasting each other’s time.”
OK, so at this point, I know I heard her correctly the first time. I ask, “What is the name of the app?”
She says it—twice—but I’m still not hearing her correctly. Finally, she opens the Zoom chat box, types, and hits send:
(“SEXY BRAND”).”
Dumb me finally gets it. I’ve definitely heard of this app. I believe they were innovators in the sub-category of teledildonics. My face turns bright red. Krista saves me by saying, “Don’t worry, I’ve had lots of conversations like this.”
It’s a fun conversation from here. She shares some of the selling points for her tech roles, including great salary, generous benefits, and the chance to work on a video-based consumer app that millions of people use…ahem…quite often.
I’m not offended, but tell Krista I’d need to talk with my team to make sure we’re OK.
I close the Zoom window and sit at my desk laughing so hard that my dog started barking from all the way upstairs. Then I get on with my co-founder, Ryan, and tell him the story—laughing so hard I’m in tears.
But then we’ve got to get down to business. Should we take this company as a client?
I pull a page from my agency exec team, long ago, and bring our 5-person team together that afternoon. Krista provided helpful guidance on how to brief candidates on the opportunity, so we think we can fill the openings. None of us has moral issues with the service provided. We could really use the revenue, but don’t want to sell our souls.
However, our five-person team consists entirely of dudes. I think about what this early decision will mean for the future of the company—one that I hope will include women very soon. How will they feel?
That’s when I realize I need input from the women in my life: My wife and teenage daughters. I suggest we all ask our wives what they think. I’m the only one with kids old enough to understand what we’re talking about here fully.
So, it’s going to be an interesting discussion at the dinner table that night…
I describe the situation and the client’s service. I ask them how they feel about their Husband/Dad paying the mortgage in this way. I want to make it clear that while I’m not necessarily seeking a vote, their input is important to me.
I care about what these women think because our decision affects them; they have insights that I am missing, and I value their love and respect far more than the dollar amount of my share of these recruiting fees.
They’re fine with it.
In fact, my daughters like the idea of women presenting their bodies as they please and getting compensated in this client’s business model, in which a majority of the viewing revenue goes to the creators.
Our team gathers the next day, and I’m glad that everyone’s conversations went well. I give Krista the go-ahead, and we begin work to find a backend engineer for the company.
You might not have taken on this client if you were in my shoes. Maybe there are several decisions that I have shared here that go against your grain. GOOD! That means you’re thinking about the issue, which is all I’m really pushing for here.
There are plenty of other ways to make or rationalize decisions like this. Charlie Munger said, “Don’t sell what you wouldn’t buy.” Some people try to calculate whether a product they make or a client they work for is a “net positive” in the world. Others opt entirely and refuse to sell, buy, or process anything.
We need to keep holding the discomfort that comes up. Don’t live racked with guilt, but recognize the quesiness and be willing to re-evaluate your feelings as you and society change. By staying conscious of our decisions, we’ll make better ones and evolve in a positive direction over time.
As I alluded to above, one of my biggest frustrations with society today is that we have no mutual agreement on what is ethical. This seems to mean we’re stuck in a lowest common denominator where the only rules are set in legal contracts and financial returns.
But maybe the lack of standards of behavior is a feature, not a bug, of this big game called life. “Ethics” is easy because it means we’re going along with the crowd—acting unconsciously. Instead, each one of us has to make our own decisions rather than deferring to the rules of society or the religion we grew up with. Conscious struggling might be what we need to move forward. We have to make up our own truth, which is the ultimate test of who we are.
This might be a good time to bring up the word “Sin.”
It’s a word I used to think of negatively, as a religious-tinged judgement. But a few years ago, I learned that it comes from a Greek word meaning “to miss the mark”—as in archery.
This is how I try to think about the decisions I make in life now: The “mark” for me is acting in a way that improves others’ lives. With that aim, I must judge my decisions as being on or off the mark. Setting our own life goals and seriously testing our ability to stick with them is a big part of growing up.
My record is not perfect, and I’ve got some regrets, but they serve as reminders more than a nagging stressor or lingering need for forgiveness from a higher power. We only learn through our mistakes—our misses.
This means I have to stop judging others’ decisions, too. We’ve all got our own tests to take. Different people have different aims.
However, while we must decide for ourselves, we must remember that our actions have ripple effects that can improve or worsen the lives of our employees, partners, and potentially millions of people who interact with our products and marketing.
I increasingly find myself pulling away from people who are stuck at the fear and greed levels of the game of life. I hold love for these players, and I hope they see a better route one day, but I don’t want to play with them anymore.
Instead, I’m looking for inspiration from people who look for ways to serve others before themselves. I was happy that this example found me a few days ago:
Sharing the wealth was the key to both my company acquisition earnouts. And the joy of signing my team’s checks vastly exceeded the few extra million dollars I might have in my investment account today.
As I listen more closely—outside of the hustle porn, and hacking tricks—I find remarkable stories of people who give unselfishly and end up seeing the benefits bounce back in surprising positive ways.
Take my friend “Chris”. He’s a 30-something sales leader who told me his story of being down on his luck at work and home. For some reason, at a low point in his depression and bank account, he made a significant donation to a worthy cause.
He immediately felt better and continued giving. Within months, he was crushing his quota and found peace with his family challenges.
Money is at the heart of this entire post—the work we do for money.
Maybe the biggest test of our times is whether we make decisions more for money or meaning.
“It’s not about having more, it’s about being more.”—Tony Nader
The more we test ourselves, and the more we are aware and struggle with these tests, the further we expand our consciousness. I think this is kind of the whole point of playing this game of life.
I’m rooting for you to hit the mark.
If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
Deep Cover: Mob Land
Speaking of moral tests…On an 8-hour road trip last week, my wife and I listened to Season 2 of the Deep Cover podcast, titled “Mob Land.”
It’s the story of mob corruption in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s, centered on a slick attorney who is part of the problem—until he turns himself in. I think you’ll love the overall story arc and the many views from the people involved.
In addition to living vicariously through real people’s moral tests, the Deep Cover series warms me with the knowledge that high-quality journalism is still alive and well—it’s just moved to new media and platforms. Somebody get these guys a Peabody Award!
