In 1995, Purdue Pharma began selling a powerful and addictive opioid drug called OxyContin. The company was aware that the drug, which was marketed to doctors as a safe way to manage chronic pain, was a potent narcotic that could quickly hook patients. Even as opioid abuse swept the nation, Purdue, earning billions, kept churning out its pills.
By now, this story is a familiar one. But what is less well known is that the company had help not only from management consultant McKinsey & Company, which sold advice to Purdue on how to increase sales, but from legislators, doctors, pharmacists, and distributors. It took a village of complicity to create an opioid epidemic that has led to a surge in overdose deaths, says Max H. Bazerman, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
“It's taking other people off the hook who could have done something and didn't do anything.”
In the new book Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop, Bazerman points to the Purdue example as emblematic of the troubling human tendency to go along with acts of wrongdoing, and he provides prescriptive advice for avoiding the trap.
“What caused the opioid crisis?” asks Bazerman. “We think the Sackler family. What caused the number of sexual assaults at Miramax? Harvey Weinstein. And it's not that these answers are wrong. It's just that it's taking other people off the hook who could have done something and didn't do anything.”
Bazerman’s book, which publishes in November, can provide important lessons for business people in an era where consumers expects companies to behave responsibly more than ever.
Enabling unethical behavior
In the case of Purdue Pharma, McKinsey advised Purdue on boosting sales and evading government regulation, while also advising the government—the drug-regulation division of the US Food and Drug Administration—on how to strengthen its oversight of pharma. In addition to this alleged conflict of interest, McKinsey recommended questionable sales tactics to Purdue, including incentivizing pharmacies to write more high-dosage OxyContin prescriptions, which exacerbated patients’ addictions.
Meanwhile, there were more than 68,000 opioid addiction deaths in the US in 2020, nearly a 17-fold increase over the 4,000 opioid overdose deaths of 1999. McKinsey ultimately paid a $573 million settlement to 47 states for working to help “turbocharge” Purdue’s sales efforts.
Bazerman describes two groups of explicit complicitors. “True partners” hold goals aligned with the unethical values of a wrongdoer. “Collaborators,” on the other hand, acquiesce because they have something to gain, but never truly believe in a perpetrator’s mission.
Some examples of collaborators include those assistants and actors who kept silent even as movie producer Harvey Weinstein assaulted women. Also in this category, says Bazerman, are legislators like Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell who castigated Donald Trump for his unethical behavior when he was a presidential candidate but who publicly remained silent after President Trump exhorted a mob to breach the US Capitol building.
“Graham and McConnell were never true partners with Trump the way that Steve Bannon was,” writes Bazerman in Complicit. “They didn’t share Trump’s open disdain for democracy and the rule of law, or his support for white supremacists. Rather, they were traitors, willing to work with a harm-doer to get what they wanted.”
We’re all complicit
Egregious examples of complicity are easy to find. Many Germans went along with Nazism, although they disagreed with it. The US Olympic Committee kept Larry Nassar as the gymnast team’s doctor even when it had reason to suspect he was sexually abusing young athletes. Catholic Church officials remained silent even when they knew some priests were sexually abusing children. But complicity is not always as explicit, says Bazerman. It is sometimes implicit and unintentional.
“Rather than dig in and learn more, we basically look the other way and go back to problems we understand.”
On a less dramatic level, we’re all complicit, often implicitly, says Bazerman, whose book draws from examples in his own life as well. Our “ordinary complicity” might be continuing to work for a company we believe is destroying the environment or maybe ignoring ongoing sexual harassment perpetrated by a colleague.
“Rather than dig in and learn more, we basically look the other way and go back to problems we understand,” says Bazerman.
The problem is, if we choose to overlook bad behavior, we fail to acknowledge our own complicity, and we miss an opportunity to make the world a better place, Bazerman says.
Avoiding complicity
While it may sometimes seem overwhelming, Bazerman says we can avoid being complicit in unethical acts and policies if we use a few strategies:
Reduce the risk of speaking up. Workers and managers who want to speak out should develop a game plan just in case speaking out results in being fired. Workers can also make it more difficult for an organization to levy punishment by looking for ways to increase their value to a firm.
Acknowledge blind spots. Rarely does bad behavior stem from just a single source. Consider the system and others who might be at fault. Be aware that unethical behavior often becomes more acceptable when it happens gradually, over time.
Widen the circle of deciders. When more people are involved in making a decision, actions tend to be more ethical. In contrast, focusing narrowly on one’s own group—an employer, family, a church—can result in tunnel vision that aids one group at the expense of others.
Empower group action. Recognize that individuals may be nervous about exposing bad behavior on their own. Encourage systems that allow individuals to come together to protest unethical behavior.
Consider the company’s organizational structure. Does the company encourage some behaviors and not others? Who gets hired? Who gets promoted? And does an organization’s behavior align with its stated mission?
Increase diversity. More voices and more perspectives reduce the complicity of those in the majority who may be perpetuating inequity.
“You need to ask yourself, if this person is being harassed, do I want it on me that I could have done something about it?”
Avoiding complicity, Bazerman says, comes down to pausing to reflect on some basic questions about goals for your own life.
“You need to ask yourself, if this person is being harassed, do I want it on me that I could have done something about it? Do I want it on me that people are overdosing on opioids? Do I want it on me that I'm helping to create an elitist system that's discriminatory? We can go on and on,” he says. “Quite frankly, I want to lead my life so that I'm comfortable that I'm on the side of goodness most of the time. I don't want to be involved in being part of the bad story.”
You Might Also Like:
- Has #MeToo Changed How Hollywood Hires?
- Empower Your Employees to Make Better Decisions
- How to Make the World Better, Not Perfect
Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu.
Image: iStockphoto/MILANTE