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The Eagle and the
Knapsack
by Rushworth M. Kidder, Character Counts Online <www.charactercounts.org>
For more articles on disabilities and special ed visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
Character, we’ve been told, is what you are in the dark, when
no one’s looking.
The test of character, by this definition, lies in how you
behave when public approval and overt reward are stripped
away. When you can get away with anything — because nothing’s
at stake except your own conscience — what do you do?
No question about it: Character does get tested that way. But
in the hurly-burly of today’s world, such moments are few. Far
more common are tests of character that happen when everyone’s
watching — and when the rewards are significant. Character is
indeed private and personal. But it’s also public and social.
That at least was how it played out for Floyd, who shared his
own experience in one of our seminars several years ago. Floyd
(not his real name) was a senior executive at a leading
advertising agency. One of his top clients was preparing a
line of lightweight knapsacks for the Christmas season and
wanted to launch it with a major TV ad campaign. So Floyd’s
creative staff, after days of huddling, came up with an idea
everyone thought was a winner. Here sits the knapsack on a
rock in the wilderness, with snowcapped peaks in the
background. Down swoops an eagle, grasps the knapsack in its
talons, and carries it away. The imagery is terrific:
lightness, strength, beauty, flight, and the great outdoors
all rolled into one.
Terrific concept, says the client. So Floyd contacts an animal
trainer in California to prepare an eagle. He nails down a
Rocky Mountain site for the shoot. And he lines up the details
— writers, producers, cameras, lighting, travel, housing, and
all the rest. It will take a day on location to shoot the
footage, which he budgets in the six-figure range. The client
signs off and promises to send a representative along for the
trip.
Several weeks later the trainer calls with good news: The
eagle knows how to pick up the knapsack. Floyd arranges the
date, sends the team off, and turns his attention to other
matters. A few days later, he gets the videotape — a glorious
sequence, with the bird soaring in, grabbing the knapsack, and
flying away. The client loves it.
But one afternoon, just as Floyd is preparing to schedule
advertising space on national television, two of his staff
slip into his office, shut the door behind them, and ask if
they can talk.
They were on location in Colorado, they tell him, and it was
time to film the eagle. Everything was set. The cameras were
rolling. The bird swooped down on command and grabbed the
knapsack — and couldn’t lift it. The crew tried the sequence
again. Same thing. Then it dawned on the trainer that the
bird, trained at sea level, couldn’t get enough air under its
wings at ten thousand feet. So with time running out, and the
client’s representative watching, the crew members tied some
almost-invisible monofilament fishing line to the knapsack.
Then two of them, holding the line and standing just out of
camera range, gave it a jerk just as the eagle grabbed the
knapsack — and up it went. The client’s representative, new to
advertising production, registered no complaint — perhaps
because she mistakenly thought such practices were standard.
Back in the studio, they used the computer to erase the faint
images of the hair-thin line. Result: A visually flawless
commercial, which only a handful of people would ever know was
partly fabricated.
Floyd listened, astonished and dismayed. All kinds of things
ran through his head. On the one hand, he knew the public
doesn’t always expect TV ads to be true to life. After all,
how many housewives, cleaning their kitchen floors, have had a
white-robed genie suddenly spin through the window and offer
them a better bottle of wax? Yet nothing else in this ad
announced it as a fabrication. Given its realistic appearance,
wouldn’t the viewer reasonably expect it to reflect a real
situation? After all, what about the recent outcry in the
press when a foreign carmaker made an apparently realistic ad
to promote its products — and was later found to have rigged
the filming? Yet this was different, Floyd reasoned. There was
no attempt to deceive. The eagle could indeed pick up the
knapsack — at sea level. It just couldn’t do it at ten
thousand feet.
Floyd knew that, in today’s video culture, audiences are
seasoned viewers of special effects. Some viewers would write
off the entire ad as a studio creation, despite the fact that
it really had been filmed on location. They wouldn’t care
about the fishing line.
Floyd also knew he could reshoot at a lower altitude — for
another day’s costs, which his company would have to swallow,
and with serious consequences for the client’s schedule, which
was already running perilously close to the Christmas
deadlines. Miss those deadlines, and the new product could be
dead in the water.
He knew, too, that he could paste the word “simulation” onto
the screen in the current ad — but that the client, having
paid for the real thing, would be pretty upset with that
solution.
Finally, he knew he had a stark choice before him. He could
tell the client. Or he could let the ad run as it was.
His colleagues were waiting for him to make the call.
The Two Components of Character
In fact, what his colleagues were waiting to see was an
expression of character. In that context, they were not
thinking of character in its commonplace meaning (almost
synonymous with personality) — a set of individual attributes
or qualities by which someone is known. They were thinking of
character in its moral sense, the capacity to express
integrity, virtue, goodness. They were waiting to see how
Floyd’s outward behavior — phoning the media buyers or phoning
the client to break the bad news — would manifest an inner set
of moral values.
Character, then, has two components: values and behavior. We
reserve our highest sense of the word character for actions
where the values and the behavior come together seamlessly.
Individuals who lack character, we say, are those who can’t
bring themselves to do what’s right — either because they lack
moral courage or because their values are so flaccid and
impoverished that any action based on them is also morally
anemic. Individuals of character, in contrast, are those who
walk their talk, keep their promises, do what’s right. There’s
no daylight visible between the standards they profess and the
ways they act. The one perfectly reflects the other.
Is there, then, a set of shared moral values upon which most
people construct their character? That’s a question I asked in
interviewing twenty-four individuals from sixteen countries
for my book Shared Values for a Troubled World: Conversations
with Men and Women of Conscience. They represented a wide
variety of cultural, political, and religious backgrounds, and
each was a moral exemplar within his or her culture. Among
other things, I asked them, “If you could construct a global
code of ethics for the 21st century, what would be on it?” Out
of their answers came a set of eight values so widely shared
and so cross-cultural that they seemed truly global: love,
truth, freedom, fairness, unity, tolerance, responsibility,
and respect for life.
More recently, a report from the Institute for Global Ethics
detailed the results of an October 1996 survey the institute
conducted at the annual meeting of the State of the World
Forum in San Francisco. The 272 survey participants
represented forty countries and more than fifty different
faith communities. Despite their differences, they came
together strongly around a shared set of moral values that
elevated truth, compassion, and responsibility to the top
ranks. Nor did the survey find any differences in values
correlated to such characteristics as nationality, sex,
religion, age, or social status. The participants' values were
apparently uninfluenced by such demographic characteristics.
In the institute’s seminars — which have brought together more
than five thousand people in small teams that discuss and
determine their shared values — five values almost always
stand out: honesty, compassion, fairness, responsibility, and
respect. These values, in fact, square well with those of
various codes already in existence: the Rotary Four-Way Test;
the Boy Scout Law; the Six Pillars of Character developed by
the CHARACTER COUNTS! Coalition and the Josephson Institute;
the ten rules identified by American philosopher Bernard Gert
in his book The Moral Rules: A New Foundation for Morality;
the "five basic commands to human beings" adumbrated by German
philosopher Hans Kung in Global Responsibility: In Search of a
New World Ethic; the seven "terminal values" identified by
Milton Rokeach and Sandra Ball-Rokeach in their groundbreaking
values research; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
and the hundreds of corporate, professional, governmental, and
educational codes of values.
What is the bottom line? A minimalist set of core shared
values seems to be part and parcel of the human experience —
not because we are Buddhists or Moslems, Jews or Christians,
left-wing or right-wing, rich or poor, male or female, but
because we are human.
That set of shared values is half of what we mean when we talk
about character. If these core values are missing in any
serious way — if someone is, say, compassionate and fair but
an inveterate liar — we’re hard pressed to describe him or her
as someone of character. And if the moral boundary within
which these values operate is so wizened and narrow as to
apply to only a few other people — if individuals are
compassionate only toward members of their own family, tribe,
or race but treat everyone else with cold disdain or venomous
hatred — there, too, we say that something is lacking in
character. Character, then, roots itself in the core moral
values.
But it doesn’t stop there. True character arises in the
practice of sound values. Now and then we encounter
individuals with a finely turned moral conscience but a
wholesale incapacity to act on their beliefs. Perhaps they
feel above the world, dismissing it with contempt and refusing
to act for its betterment. Perhaps they shrink into timidity
every time they are called upon to take a stand. Perhaps they
are consumed with desire for wealth, fame, or power — the
three great drivers of unethical behavior — and cannot bring
themselves to make any sacrifice, however small, for the sake
of integrity.
Whatever the reason, a failure to align action with values —
even when the values are splendid — leads to the perception
that character is lacking. Usually, it seems, the fault lies
in a lack of moral courage. My 1926 Webster’s defines
“courage” as “mental or moral strength enabling one to
venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear or difficulty
firmly and resolutely.” To illustrate, it quotes General
William T. Sherman, who defined “true courage” as “a perfect
sensibility of the measure of danger and a mental willingness
to endure it.” If you don’t know there’s danger — if you’re
sleepwalking on the ridgepole — you can’t be said to have
courage. Nor do you have it if you sense the danger and aren’t
willing to endure it. Sherman, of course, was talking about
physical courage. Its moral counterpart arises when the
measure of danger comes from taking the moral high ground.
Character? Think of it as the product of core values and moral
courage.
The Support for Values and Courage
What about Floyd’s character? That’s what his colleagues were
asking. Would he bull on forward with the ad, trusting that it
wouldn’t make waves but willing to justify it if something
broke? Or would he disappoint one of his lead clients — and
cost the firm a bundle — by sticking to standards that many
viewers might see as needlessly narrow?
It was not, Floyd recalled, an easy decision — not so much
because of the cost as because of the deadline. In the end,
however, he called the client, pulled the video, and offered
to reshoot. The client was so disappointed that it opted for a
wholly different ad campaign, abandoning the eagle entirely.
“You never saw that ad,” Floyd reported to the seminar,
“because it never ran.”
Run a check on Floyd’s values, and you’ll find them very much
like most people’s. Truth was there, telling him to be honest
and upfront about the experience. Responsibility was there,
telling him that if his firm made a mistake they had to make
it good, regardless of cost. Respect was there, telling him
that his audiences deserved better than to be deceived, even
modestly. Fairness was there, telling him that he had to make
no special deals with one client that he was unwilling to make
with every client, present or future. And compassion was
there, telling him that his two colleagues deserved to be
honored for speaking up — and to see proof that they were
right in expressing moral qualms.
But all that could have been in place, and still Floyd could
have lacked the courage to act. What helped him, he told the
seminar, was the company’s own moral standards. His firm, he
felt, had a long tradition of ethical behavior. When he found
himself staring down the barrel of this decision, he knew he
had to do what would be in the best long-term interests of his
firm. He knew he risked a lot of money. He knew he could lose
a client. But that, for him, was less important than the
possible loss of the firm’s reputation for ethical business.
And he knew, deep down, that many of his fellow executives
would back him up. He knew that the culture of the firm was
such that ethics would ultimately be rewarded — however much
they all had to tighten their belts and admit mistakes in the
meantime.
What made the difference here? It’s easy to take the narrow
view and say, “Floyd’s character, because he had the guts to
make the tough moral call.” And that’s certainly true. But
there’s more. At least three other things mattered:
Floyd was the kind of person you could talk to about moral
issues. Otherwise his colleagues would never have approached
him with their concerns.
He was surrounded by people who recognized a moral qualm when
they saw one — and were willing to be publicly worried about
it.
His corporate culture supported ethics, and that culture had
been well enough articulated that Floyd could feel its
presence when he most needed it.
Too often the study of moral character misses these last three
vital points. Yes, character is what you are in the dark. But
it’s more. It has a social as well as a personal aspect.
First, it’s what you let others know you to be — the way you
communicate to others an openness to ethical concern, a
willingness to engage tough moral issues, an invitation to
openly challenge your actions by your values.
Second, character doesn’t exist in a personal vacuum. Show me
the person of solid character who doesn’t have a single
ethical colleague, and I’ll show you a person who is either so
inspired as to be a saint or so out of touch with reality as
to be delusional. Like coals in a fireplace, we keep our sense
of character warm by contact with each other. Set any one of
us alone on the moral hearth, and we’ll pretty quickly turn to
a cold, dark cinder.
Third, character benefits mightily from an organizational
culture. The most open and moral thinker, with the finest of
friends, can get beaten into submission by a crass and immoral
culture — unless (and this is more likely) he or she bails out
altogether and finds another workplace. Conversely, those
willing to learn more about their own characters — and we’re
all learning how best to square our values with our actions —
will find it far easier to be ethical if, at every turn, the
institution applauds and rewards such behavior.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that organizations as well as
individuals need to think about character as never before.
Why? Because, as we move into the twenty-first century, the
moral intensity is rising. Increasingly our new technologies
are leveraging our ethics, so that single unethical decisions
can now have worldwide consequences in ways impossible to
imagine just a few years ago. Yet when a Chernobyl melts down,
a Barings Bank goes belly up, a Challenger explodes, an Exxon
Valdez goes aground — or when an ad gets made in a potentially
deceptive manner — the fault lies not with new technologies.
It lies with a collapse of character, a failure in ethical
decision making by the actors who drive the technologies.
If character matters, it is not because a few impassioned
thinkers know it’s important. It is because we won’t survive
the twenty-first century without it.
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