When Charlie Munger recommended reading Max Bazerman’s Judgment in Managerial Decision Making I had never hear of the HBS professor. A lot of reading later and I’m a huge fan.
In the HBR article below Bazerman covers some of the ground from his new book Blind Spots (see my notes).
These days, many of us are instructed to make decisions from a business perspective (thereby reducing or eliminating the ethical implications of our decisions). The Ford Pinto example below is very telling:
Consider an infamous case that, when it broke, had all the earmarks of conscious top-down corruption. The Ford Pinto, a compact car produced during the 1970s, became notorious for its tendency in rear-end collisions to leak fuel and explode into flames. More than two dozen people were killed or injured in Pinto fires before the company issued a recall to correct the problem. Scrutiny of the decision process behind the model’s launch revealed that under intense competition from Volkswagen and other small-car manufacturers, Ford had rushed the Pinto into production. Engineers had discovered the potential danger of ruptured fuel tanks in preproduction crash tests, but the assembly line was ready to go, and the company’s leaders decided to proceed. Many saw the decision as evidence of the callousness, greed, and mendacity of Ford’s leaders—in short, their deep unethicality.
But looking at their decision through a modern lens—one that takes into account a growing understanding of how cognitive biases distort ethical decision making—we come to a different conclusion. We suspect that few if any of the executives involved in the Pinto decision believed that they were making an unethical choice. Why? Apparently because they thought of it as purely a business decision rather than an ethical one.
Taking an approach heralded as rational in most business school curricula, they conducted a formal cost-benefit analysis—putting dollar amounts on a redesign, potential lawsuits, and even lives—and determined that it would be cheaper to pay off lawsuits than to make the repair. That methodical process colored how they viewed and made their choice. The moral dimension was not part of the equation. Such “ethical fading,” a phenomenon first described by Ann Tenbrunsel and her colleague David Messick, takes ethics out of consideration and even increases unconscious unethical behavior.
Continue Reading at HBR.
I recommend you purchase Judgment in Managerial Decision Making and Blind Spots.