One of the pleasures of browsing through the “sale” bin of a bookstore is finding titles that you would never have looked for, and enjoying the treasure you have found.
This is true of a book I found ages ago, entitled Movies to Manage By: Lessons in Leadership from Great Films by John K. Clemens and Melora Wolff. It included nine great movies, which were categorized under groupings as: (1) Guiding the Ship, under which were discussed the movies, The Hunt for Red October, Apollo 13 and Dead Poets Society; (2) Creating a Team, with the movies Hoosiers and Norma Rae; (3) Conflicts and Turnarounds, with the movies 12 Angry Men and Twelve O’Clock High; and (4) Self Leadership, with the movies Citizen Kane and Wall Street.
At the time, I bought the book when I had been teaching ethics, and the chapter on Wall Street was related to my subject. So I gave my class the pleasurable assignment of watching that old movie. The movie was an excellent example on morality and leadership. Without going into a summary of the movie itself, the story is about the Wall Street of the 1980s, then described as the “Decade of Greed,” a time when almost everything—ethics, ideals, honesty —was sacrificed at the altar of “The Hot Deal.”
The protagonists are Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) and Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen). Gekko is a highly successful, amoral investment executive whose vision statement is: “Greed…is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upsurge of mankind.”
Bud is a young, upcoming stockbroker trying to build his career on Wall Street, who falls under the spell of Gekko. Together, Gekko and Bud illustrate that decade when sleaze and insider trading were on a par for the course, and the stock market had more to do with stock values rather than fundamentals. Bud dreams of money, power, luxury, stature and reputation as he sees in Gekko, and is seduced to shaking himself free of his father’s (played by Martin Sheen) burdensome ethics. The movie takes us through Bud’s journey from the surrender of his soul to Gekko, as he acquires a fancy lifestyle and, thus, breaks up with his father to his eventual plunge from the roller coaster he has ridden, when he is frisked and handcuffed by the SEC.
Sometimes, one is provoked to think that “business ethics” is an oxymoron. One wonders whether Gekko’s “Greed is good” is an offshoot of Adam Smith’s argument that “self-interest” is what propels progress, where an individual pursuing his own good is led by an invisible hand to achieve the best good for all.
We might consider that the frenzy of the ’80s and ’90s, and its obsession with Wall Street’s quarterly reporting resulted in pursuing the stock price as an end in itself, rather than treating it as the natural by product of a successful company. Those were heady days for companies that were feted and recognized on the covers of magazines, only to end up in a tsunami of corporate failures led by Enron (the mother of all bad corporate governance stories), Tyco, Worldcom, Parmalat, etc., etc.
I had chosen the movie Wall Street for my students in “Ethics and Corporate Governance,” for in the end the lesson from the downfall of Gekko and Bud should be a new mantra that good corporate governance avers: fairness, transparency, accountability and, indeed, ethics.
E-mail: merci.suleik@gmail.com