You've Got to Be Kidding!: How to Keep Your Job Without Losing Your Integrity

The Dark Side of Loyalty

Unfortunately, for all its virtue, loyalty has a dark side as well. When a company overemphasizes this kind of blind devotion, we have what FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley terms groupthink. The result is a dangerous lack of skepticism and debate, denial of factual reality, and suspension of personal responsibility.

Corporate cultures that tolerate nothing less than unconditional obedience take a short cut to a dead end. This is a familiar excuse at these companies for poor outcomes: “Right or wrong, if my boss tells me to do it, I do it.” In this environment, anyone raising questions is seen as “disloyal,” even when they have crucial and perhaps lifesaving concerns. This was the case in both the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle tragedies wherein a “little guy” at NASA challenged the groupthink up the chain of command—and was systematically rebuffed and vilified in response.

Loyalty gone awry is betrayal at its worst. The previous chapter touched on the Madoff-like scandal in my city in the form of charismatic CEO Tom Petters, who allegedly spent years building a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme to finance his luxury lifestyle. This all came to a crashing end when—as it had with Bernie Madoff and other operators of such mind-boggling, unprecedented pyramid schemes that surface periodically—Petters was arrested and his empire shut down by the government. A few days later, his stunned executive assistant, DeAnne Anderson (who had no involvement or knowledge ...