Published Autumn 1998
BOOK LOOK: Clever as Serpents
From Aristotle's "Human beings are rational animals" to Dilbert's "People are idiots," Clever as Serpents: Business Ethics and Office Politics (The Liturgical Press) offers a value-based and often humorous examination of behavior in the business world.
Authors Jim Grote and John McGeeney, a graduate of Notre Dame Law School, weave together such diverse sources of insight as French behavioral scientist René Girard, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pope John Paul II to make their case that ethical behavior is both possible and desirable in a system that seems designed for unfair practices. They describe the business world as a marketplace where competition, scapegoating greed and gossip all can hold sway.
Grote and McGeeney zero in on office politics, tracing the underpinnings of it to ideas of blame and credit, with gossip as the currency. Their analysis of the first chapters of Genesis-- "Adam and Eve: The Original Blame Game" -- provides the background for a look at human nature and how desires and wants, blame and credit play out in the corporate field. All of which leads to practical suggestions of ways to attain one of the authors' main goals: "[T]o help readers separate their productive selves from their competitive selves."
Grote and McGeeney base their views of ethics and moral values on Catholic social teaching but say their "pragmatic concern" is to examine ways people can find to act ethically in the everyday world of work.