Leaders have to reconcile between the responsibilities they have to discharge towards multiple constituents: towards themselves; their families; their colleagues and their shareholders.
The Chicago School, led by Milton Friedman, treats shareholders as the only stakeholder group managers are answerable to. In his famous essay, Friedman argued that the sole responsibility of a company’s management is to maximise shareholder profits; nothing else matters, so long as they play by the rules of free competition.
There aren’t ethical or moral issues of relevance to the leader; only economic issues. On the other hand, Joel Bakan, in the new book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” argues that this position leads to corporations being not merely greedy, but downright pathological.
Arthur Miller’s play All My Sons is an examination of the contradictions involved in discharging these multiple responsibilities. Arthur Miller, with his Leftist leanings, has been a long-time critic of what he called the “dog eat dog society” of capitalism, so passionately brought out in his celebrated play, Death of a Salesman.
All My Sons, is based on a real life story involving supply of defective equipment to the US Army during the Second World War, is about a businessman, Joe Keller. He has a junior partner, Steve, and their firm supplies the US Air Force with cylinder heads for the engines of fighter planes.
One night, the cylinder heads coming out of the production in the factory are found to be defective and Steve, who is in the factory, informs Keller about this on phone. Under pressure to keep up supplies, Keller orders the defective heads to be welded, dressed up and despatched.
These defective parts ultimately lead to plane crashes and the firm is hauled up a court, where Keller flatly denies that he instructed Steve to pass on the defective parts. Keller and Steve are found guilty but Keller escapes conviction on appeal, while Steve goes to jail.
Keller protests his innocence before his family and Steve’s and they believe him. Steve’s son George and daughter Ann are so incensed with what their father did that they don’t even visit him in jail.
Keller has two sons, Larry and Chris, both in the armed forces during the war. Larry, who was engaged to Anne, has gone missing in action. The play drives to a climax when George, having just met his father and learnt of what actually transpired, tells the facts — and of Keller’s duplicity.
Keller continues to deny his guilt, until Chris wrenches the truth out of him. But Keller cannot understand why Chris should be worked up: this is how the world works, and besides, “I did it all for you!”
Joe Keller was under great pressure to supply the cylinder heads that the army desperately needed, the sort of pressure that is only too familiar to executives, and failure to supply may have led to cancellation of orders, now and in the future.
“You lay 40 years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take 40 years, let them take my life away?” So he took a shortcut decision, hoping they wouldn’t install the heads so fast, and may be he could replace them with good ones quietly.
Thus his subsequent denial at the trial, shows not so much his villainy as his weakness: he simply couldn’t bear the thought of going to jail.
Ann has a letter from Larry written just before he went on his last mission, saying that he cannot bear to live any longer in light of what his father did. Clearly, Larry has deliberately crashed his own plane.
All My Sons essentially takes the view that business leaders cannot escape the consequences of their actions by taking recourse to legal loopholes. There’s still a distinction between right and wrong that’s relevant in business, as compared to what is legal and illegal.
The play also looks at the linkage between private and public life. “I did it all for you”, sounds like rationalisation, but if Keller had gone to jail, his entire family would have shared in the ignominy.
In this sense he did it for his family, for his sons who would inherit his business. But does that make Keller less guilty? Business leaders may not see their own family getting directly affected by the bad decisions they take in the way Keller does.
But they must realise, as Keller finally does, that those who suffer as a consequence of their decisions are flesh and blood people. Managers need to look at the dichotomies between their public and private life, their value systems at home and at work.
There’s a need for an integral system of ethics and values, for the very word “integrity” has its origin in the word “integral”. To quote Warren Bennis, in his book Managing the Dream, “There is no difference between becoming an effective leader and becoming a fully integrated human being”.
It’s also interesting to ask: why did Larry kill himself? In times of war, an entirely different value system comes into existence. People risk their lives for their fellow soldiers; they are not “practical”.
For Larry, his colleagues were something more than mere colleagues; it made no sense for him to live when his friends were getting killed due to his father’s action. “I can’t face anybody”, says Larry in his letter.
To him, as Joe Keller realises, “they were all my sons”. Thus the point is made by Miller, “There is a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to them, and unless you know that, you threw away your son because that was why he died.”
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