Our next guest on The BIS is Eugene Soltes, Harvard professor and author of "Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of a White Collar Criminal". Eugene sits down with Cindy Moehring in this episode to discuss his experience interviewing over 50 white-collar criminals including Bernie Madoff. Eugene and Cindy also talk about what the future of business ethics education might entail for students.
Podcast:
Episode Transcript:
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0:00:13.1 Cindy Moehring: Hi, everybody! Welcome back for another edition of the Business Integrity School. And today, we are very lucky to have with us Eugene Soltes who is the Jakurski Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Welcome, Eugene!
0:00:25.8 Eugene Soltes: Thanks, Cindy! Pleasure to join.
0:00:27.9 Cindy Moehring: It's glad to have you here. Eugene focuses on how individuals and organizations confront and overcome challenging situations. In fact, he's written a really interesting book called "Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of a White-Collar Criminal", which was described by Kirkus Reviews as a ground-breaking study on white-collar criminality. And the book explores why, often, wealthy and successful executives engage in deception, and we're gonna get into that a little bit more in this podcast. Professor Soltes and his work have been widely quoted by the media, including in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, USA Today and other publications. Professor Soltes also teaches in several of the school's executive education programs, and was awarded the Charles M. Williams Award for Outstanding Teaching. Prior to joining Harvard Business School of Faculty, Professor Soltes received his PhD and MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and his AM in Statistics and AB in Economics from Harvard University. Quite an impressive resume, and we are super excited to have you here today. So how are you doing in this period of time, and how are things in Cambridge?
0:01:43.0 Eugene Soltes: We're progressing along with teaching. Actually, most of the students are on campus, but we are still primarily remote, but have a, I'll say this year, an extraordinary group of students who... I think we're looking for something a little bit different because of all the uncertainty that they're facing. So it's a pleasure to join there, but it's complicated, I think, as we're all facing, complicated.
0:02:04.3 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, yeah, we're in the same situation, almost all students are on campus, but it's sort of a hybrid, and trying to figure it all out, and it is very complicated. But fortunately for Zoom, we're able to still get together and do things like this.
0:02:16.7 Eugene Soltes: Yes, that's true.
0:02:18.2 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, so we're in the middle of talking about business ethics, and the future of business ethics, and where it is today and where it needs to be in the future. And as a reference point, I started this idea after I read Andrew Stark's article that still is widely cited in popular media about what's wrong with business ethics. It was in the Harvard Business Review, and it's from 25 years ago. And at the time, he talked about the fact that business ethics was being taught in business schools in a way that was too general and too philosophical and theoretical, and it didn't really seem to be of much use. It seems to me that we've done an awful lot in the field since then, and time to bring that article current and actually, to talk about what's ethics 3.0 look like. If that was ethics 1.0 and this is ethics 2.0, what's ethics 3.0 look like? So first, just let me ask you: What do you think about Professor Stark's observations? And do you think that they're still relevant at all today?
0:03:16.1 Eugene Soltes: Luckily, I think like you, I'm an optimist, in that we have made considerable progress. When we do case studies, when we... We're not talking philosophy in business schools anymore. Of course, we'll introduce utilitarian and various other ways of thinking, but we're doing case studies that are actually about real-life situations that real managers face in the day-to-day course of their work. And that's moving from philosophy to really, applied ethics. That said, I don't think everything has been fixed, so I'll do the glass is still half-empty in some way. And that is that there's not one person, I think, whether we're talking a business school student or frankly, someone in a company doing a corporate training exercise that thinks when they're doing it on an insider trading or embezzlement or fraud, that they're going to do that six months or a year or five years down the road. It still feels very abstract. And I think for students in the classroom, we identify the situation in a case study, they're gonna spend the half an hour or maybe even an hour discussing it. And they're also gonna do a setting in which there's dozens of people with different views and opinions. The hard part is in real life, generally, those three conditions all don't exist. People have to make them quickly, oftentimes, alone or with like-minded people, and no one isolates that decision from hundreds of other business decisions that they're making.
0:04:34.8 Cindy Moehring: Right, right.
0:04:36.8 Eugene Soltes: As a result, that's a challenge of how do we get students and business professionals to appreciate that, actually, this does happen to them? The bribe, no one thinks they're gonna pay a bribe, but we can just pay attention. That's one of the areas, FCPA, widely enforced, and many of these are great managers. Fraud, similarly, great thoughtful managers who've had a lot of success, and then we see people, let's say senior managers from McKinsey, extraordinary individuals engaging in insider trading. I think that disconnect is something we're still really struggling with. How do we bridge that divide?
0:05:11.5 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, how do we bridge that divide and bring in more of the social scientists to help understand why do people engage in that kind of behavior, which we'll get into here in a minute with your book. But first, let me ask you about something you just mentioned: Real-life cases and what situations that managers are actually facing. And you wrote a really interesting case study for Harvard Business Review and a case study, actually, about AB InBev with my friend, Matt Galvin, former Georgetown Law School alum. And the work that they had done on project, I think they called it BrewRIGHT, and how they were using data analytics and bringing in a lot of information together, I think, really, to help advance the program. But tell me a little bit about that particular situation and what you found most, I'd say the biggest advancement you found and why it interested you so much to write a case study on it for AB InBev?
0:06:08.8 Eugene Soltes: Cindy, I think you nailed it. It's that analytics standpoint, it's something... To Matt's credit, I think really pushed AB InBev program ahead in. Really trying to think about, rather than... I think a lot of compliance is still focused very much on process. You need to look at outcomes and using data to evaluate how to allocate those resources within the organization. A large complex multinational is naturally going to have things popping up from time to time. The challenge is, I see a lot of compliance programs still, what I call peanut butter spread. So you think all these resources, and you spread it evenly among 100,000, across the globe, where those risks are not, I'll say equally placed. And I think what Matt and AB InBev's program is trying to do is really go to the next level and say, given all the data that we actually have, we can bring that together to try to understand where we should be pointing our efforts when it comes to proactive risk mitigation or when it comes to monitoring and surveillance. We can use data to help us understand that.
0:07:12.2 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, I thought it was really a very interesting advancement, particularly given that they're not like a Silicon Valley data company. They're the world's largest brewery, but yet, they were doing it and then I think that was... Actually, at the time they were doing it, it was quite revolutionary for a global company to be that broad in how they were pulling together the different data streams. So it was quite an advancement.
0:07:36.3 Eugene Soltes: Especially outside... As you point out, outside financials which have budgets that kind of can dwarf others when it comes to trying different things, and they were an early mover. And I think it's one of the areas that is especially exciting to see. Firms in different ways start approaching, I would say, compliance and cultural analytics to try to get ahead of potential issues.
0:07:58.7 Cindy Moehring: You know, at the end of the case study, one of the things that I thought was interesting is that AB InBev said, the future for them, they thought and for ethics would be going further into sort of the behavioral sciences as well as further into data analytics, knowing that they had really just started. That I think is a great segue into the book and one of your interests, which is behavioral science and why people do the things they do. And you actually wrote the book called, "Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of White-Collar Criminals." And talked to, I don't know, I think it was like, what, 50 different senior-level executives that had ended up finding themselves in a big mess?
0:08:40.7 Eugene Soltes: And I'll say, oddly the book... And it seems to have become quite popular among people who unfortunately face similar situations, so probably the sample has gone up quite a bit since... Unexpectedly, since then.
[chuckle]
0:08:52.0 Cindy Moehring: Tell us a little bit about that book and what some of your findings were in there?
0:08:56.4 Eugene Soltes: I was really motivated by, I think, the same question that many people ask when they see another successful manager or leader get into trouble, something that doesn't seem to align with all the success they had previously. And so I took a very, I'll say, curious approach, which is, I wanna see the world through their eyes and understand a little bit what they were thinking. So that's what motivated me to reach out and spend time with them. Ultimately what I effectively argue in the book and the thesis is that while judges and prosecutors and, I would say, we see in the media oftentimes depict criminal decisions, especially white-collar crimes, as rational cost-benefit calculation against the cost... Benefits against the expected costs. What I really describe in the book is much more, not a failure of reasoning, but really a failure of intuition, that managers don't necessarily feel what they're doing is all that harmful.
0:09:50.2 Eugene Soltes: And I'll say easy examples, when you think of the distance, both psychological and physical between the manager and the victim, which is, it could be the investor and others, they're just far apart, they're separated. So take something like insider trading. You can't even identify the victim. We say it's the integrity of the market, so it doesn't really immediately resonate in one's gut. There's also a psychological, I would say, really a timing offset because at the time... Let's say we're at COVID time, so a lot of firms are struggling now. You do, let's say a sleight of hand to help boost the firm. It'll take a little channel stuffing, a little fraud, one of the many options. What do you see? You think you're helping out your colleagues, let's keep their job a little longer. The investors, we don't need our stock to go down now. And once COVID's done this is all gonna come back and things will be back to normal, so this is just a temporary situation.
0:10:42.8 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:10:43.6 Eugene Soltes: We're gonna hear that word, temporary situation, I know shortly too, [laughter] in a different context, but, I'll say, that goes a long way to rationalization and you see good people and good managers doing things that are abnormally consequential. But we don't naturally in our gut, I think, as humans, we weren't built to run corporations that span the globe, and you can influence people in a second that are thousands of miles away. But that's what we've created now with the modern corporation.
0:11:10.0 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, yeah, it's quite interesting. It is what you've described. It's like... So particularly in a time of COVID, if a company's hurting a bit and you pull sales forward for a quarter. It's like, "Okay, well, I'm not necessarily benefiting personally from that, I'm not getting money in my pocket and really, what I'm doing is I'm just trying to help the company, and it's just temporary and we'll go back and fix it." And so good people can make small missteps and rationalize, it is like you said. It's like, "Well, who's really getting hurt?" 'Cause it doesn't hit you in the gut that anybody's really getting hurt. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
0:11:40.6 Eugene Soltes: Double-pledging is an interesting one now, double-pledging collateral, something I've heard from former students. This is an area where you're in a hard time now and you don't have enough collateral, you need additional funding, and so pledging collateral to multiple sources, something obviously fraudulent, that is illegal. But if you don't think you're ever going to... The bank's never gonna collect on that collateral, naturally you can easily convince yourself, "It doesn't matter, who cares? And if I don't get the additional loan, the business will go under and real people will be harmed." And so, I guess I've spent a lot of time pondering how easy it would be with a bit of pressure to fall in that trap.
0:12:21.0 Cindy Moehring: So in your book, back to the book, one of the individuals that you talk about in the book is Bernie Madoff, who's the renowned stockbroker turned fraudster, serving 150 years in prison now for the largest Ponzi scheme ever. And you, I thought was quite interesting, actually called him up and talked to him in prison several times to just kinda...
0:12:42.4 Eugene Soltes: I should clarify, he had to call me, collect. [chuckle]
0:12:45.3 Cindy Moehring: Okay, right.
[laughter]
0:12:46.5 Cindy Moehring: You had conversations with him while he was in prison and they had to be in 15-minute chunks because that was all the amount of time they had, which I just thought was quite interesting that you were able to have that kind of conversation with him. But he really shared something I thought was interesting about why he did it, 'cause you asked him, "Why did you do it and what would you say to students?" Would it be okay with you if we play just a bit of that tape when he shared with you why he did it?
0:13:12.3 Eugene Soltes: Of course, of course.
0:13:14.3 Cindy Moehring: Okay, let me get that cued up here, just one sec. Here we go. This is Bernie Madoff.
0:13:20.4 Bernie Madoff: I guess, like sort of starting from scratch, type of an entrepreneurial type of enterprise where you start out, not exactly... At least in my part, not exactly sure what I wanted to do in life, other than be a success. And then because of my beginnings and because I would have to have been in a business where... It was sort of a... That was hard to break into, in a sense that it was... There was all the... It was controlled, pretty much, by the establishment. And I clearly was an outsider of that establishment, not coming from money or not certainly coming from even a connected family. And just being able to succeed in that and then all of a sudden, having a mindset where you feel you could almost accomplish anything. And I built my confidence up to a level where I felt that there was nothing that I couldn't attain. And it became like a challenge for me to go up against the establishment and try and break into the business. And because of the success I had and because I was always going up against difficult odds, I probably didn't think long and hard enough about some of the things that I did like getting into the problem where I started to go off the tracks.
0:15:15.6 Bernie Madoff: And that I was able to convince myself that this was a temporary situation. And because of all my success, I was going to be able to continue to do that. And probably just didn't give it enough thought or wasn't frightened enough to say to myself, "I can't do this, I can't take the risk," or, "I shouldn't be taking the risk." Because clearly, I didn't give enough thought to that. In hindsight, when I look back, it wasn't as if I couldn't have said no. It wasn't like I was being blackmailed to doing something or I was afraid or even afraid of getting caught doing it. I rationalized that what I was doing was okay, it wasn't gonna hurt anybody, it was a temporary thing. And because of the success that I've had and the money I made with people, I felt that it was just the temporary situation acceptable.
0:16:43.9 Cindy Moehring: Wow! So he said three times in three minutes that he thought it was just... Rationalized it in his mind as just a temporary thing.
0:16:53.9 Eugene Soltes: Right, which obviously, his mistakes dwarf all others. But I think in the... I spoke with him, basically, every Wednesday night for three years. So that's, obviously, a very small time, but I'll say particularly unusual, I think reflective, when the times he became especially reflective on his conduct. And I think that temporary is something that we can all resonate with any error that's being made, most of us think it wouldn't continue going on. Frankly, giving him the credit that he would have come up with a 10-plus billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, giving him too much credit. He didn't think that that would last, or that would be created.
0:17:27.0 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:17:27.7 Eugene Soltes: I think the point he did make that I'll say I think about is the... And it's so simple, but I just never gave it enough thought. There's something so simple, but powerful about that, that he deliberately isolated himself from everyone else that could be providing that what I call uncomfortable dissonance. His spouse, his sons, those close workers, they all enabled him, rather than pushed back. And one of the things I explored near the end of my book is, what you find is when people are going down a wrong route, it's the people that are close to them that they respect. Sometimes, this is a family member; sometimes, this is a colleague that can intercede and stop that from going off the tracks. And with Madoff, unfortunately, created almost the exact opposite environment. Everyone enabled it, rather than anyone was there to stop it. And I think that's why ultimately, it became such a tragedy.
0:18:23.7 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, and maybe that's why it became the largest Ponzi scheme in history, is because he just had all enablers. And to your point, he didn't have anyone who was pulling him back on the tracks in the right way. Wow! Really interesting, three years worth of 15-minute conversations that once a week. [chuckle]
0:18:42.1 Eugene Soltes: And a whole pile of letters. Yeah, it was... My Wednesday night in my office calling, calling, collect. But what's so amazing is that, and tragic is that we actually look back in the 70s and 80s, his firm, a lot of things we take for granted now: Decimalization, electronic trading, off-market exchange trading. Those are innovations his firm led. And so in a different world, we could see him as this respected, I'll say grandfather figure in the market, rather than being the biggest villain ever. And it's a tragedy for all those investors, those employees, so much.
0:19:22.1 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, it's a huge tragedy. And I think because of that, companies are really interested on in how can they find where they may have lapses in their own companies just as early as possible, right? So that they can try to address them. And you did some research on that and wrote another, I thought, very interesting article recently in the Harvard Business Review about that, talking about: Where is your company most prone to lapses in integrity? And I thought your advice on how companies could figure out where their lapses were was just spot on. Could you just talk about what your article found for a few minutes?
0:20:00.5 Eugene Soltes: So one of the things we're really trying to focus on exactly as you point out is, how do we understand... You could say where the hot spots are, and in particular, where are the part of the iceberg that's below the surface? Maybe most firms are looking at substantiated violations from investigations in their helpline, but there's obviously a lot of stuff that doesn't bubble up to the top. The best way of getting there, I'll say, one of the only ways is you ask. And so what we've described in the article is asking you some simple questions. Did you see misconduct in the last quarter of a diverse selection of types? If so, did you report it? If not, why not? And from that, you now get to characterize with some basic metadata, so preserve it at anonymity but knowing location and perhaps seniority, you start to get a sense of where there are issues that we probably don't see through our helpline, our analytics don't see? But people are concerned about it, and it's trending in a direction, and even maybe moreso than questions. One of the things that we've worked with our collaborators on is, actually, I would say, increasing the frequency.
0:21:03.2 Eugene Soltes: A lot of amazing firms will do, for example, an annual or even bi-annual cultural survey. When you ask similar questions to those and maybe others, but I will view that that's like if you're a CFO only got to have the balance sheet of the firm once a year. It's better than none, but no CFO only wants to see liabilities once a year. You wanna see it more regularly. And so what we propose is rather than asking if your firm has 10,000 people, all 10,000 to try to fill out the survey once a year, you can break it up with a little statistical, some statistical tricks with stratification and randomization, give it out to 750 people every month or 2500 people a quarter. Now, you have data points.
0:21:46.8 Cindy Moehring: Exactly.
0:21:47.3 Eugene Soltes: And once you have two data points, the third data point, you know, is it trending upwards or downwards? And so you get to use your own firm as a control rather than try to have apples and oranges because there's no two firms, even in the same industry, that have the same culture to compare my firm versus another firm. So that's I actually see where... We're not talking really fancy or sexy predictive data analytics or machine learning, but we're talking about a subtle change to how the data is collecting the frequency, which now allows you to draw some pretty sophisticated inferences about potential hot spots.
0:22:20.4 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really great idea. And doing it more frequently with smaller groups, it also just gives you more real-time information, it's like you said, you can't just look at a balance sheet once a year, which is essential, which most companies do when they do their cultural surveys. So yeah.
0:22:35.9 Eugene Soltes: And it's also... Cultural... Survey fatigue is real.
0:22:39.4 Cindy Moehring: It is.
0:22:39.8 Eugene Soltes: And so giving it to everyone 12 times a year or even four times a year is not gonna make you any friends. [chuckle]
0:22:45.0 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, no. No friends at all, yeah. And in fact, that's why a lot of companies end up with a very few questions and only once a year or every so often, but if you break it up and do almost poll surveys just for smaller groups, it can be a little more understandable and it can be a little more acceptable, I think.
0:23:03.5 Eugene Soltes: And employees would only be getting it once a year, from their standpoint, they only are doing it once a year, it's just, you've done it in a way that people are doing it at different times, which allows you to draw that inferences about the whole population. So I'm excited with some of the firms that we're working with to try just start this and see how that allows insights to be gained a bit quicker.
0:23:22.7 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, super smart. So Eugene, if I were to ask you for your vision of the future for Business Ethics for the next 25 years, what do you think would be the best three words or phrases to describe where you think we need to go in the future?
0:23:41.1 Eugene Soltes: So you're giving me three words, but I'm gonna emphasize one word three times.
0:23:47.0 Cindy Moehring: Okay.
0:23:47.2 Eugene Soltes: Measurement, measurement, measurement. It's the area that... When I first started a number of years ago, four years ago, really digging into, I would say, corporate compliance and integrity programs, the first thing that surprised me was, I would say, the amount of resource, time and effort that's spent, but without a real great understanding of what you're getting in return.
0:24:09.2 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:24:09.3 Eugene Soltes: I'll say, it reminded me and one of the first thing I saw is, when I watched Mad Men, a show I loved, about when the marketing person would come in, in a fancy suit, and tell you about this great marketing campaign they're gonna do, and they sell it to you. And then four months later, they came back and told you how fantastic it was. There was no data, there was no knowledge, but you believed it worked. Marketing is now hugely sophisticated, hugely analytical field.
0:24:36.6 Cindy Moehring: Right, it is.
0:24:39.0 Eugene Soltes: But complaints isn't so far off from, I think the Mad Men view of marketing circa 1950. We put out training, we put out processes, we put out codes, but we don't really know who's consuming and how. And in fact, those who do speak up and say, "I love what you've done with this training, I love the revised code of conduct." They're actually almost the worst audience to get that feedback from because they're your true believers, you want the people you never hear from that are trying to ignore it. And so what a lot of the work we're doing now is really focused on is, how can we with data create more rigorous ways for organizations to measure what is and is not working, and then be able to adjust their program in response.
0:25:20.6 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, that is so important.
0:25:21.4 Eugene Soltes: But I think with the DOJ's updated evaluation, and I think just the momentum of the field and the individuals who are coming online, who are both attorneys, psychologists, people with that are data scientists, I think that momentum when I hear you're a 3.0, that's what I hope 25 years from now, we'll look back and say, "Look at what we were doing now, and look how far we've come."
0:25:47.4 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, yeah, I would agree. So coming from theoretical philosophical to truth case analysis, and how would you resolve a situation to now here's all the measurement for how we actually achieved the results, that would be fantastic. And I agree it's gonna be needed and required. This has been a fantastic conversation, and thanks for letting us play that clip and actually hear from Bernie Madoff in one of your Wednesday night conversations. That was great, but let me end on a fun question or two for you, given that we're all spending a lot of time inside and reading and watching different things and trying to lighten the mood a bit. What have you been reading or watching or listening to as of late for fun, but that also has a really cool kind of ethical dimension to it?
0:26:32.9 Eugene Soltes: Yeah, I think everything I do is fun. I don't know if it's like because it relates to all serious issues, but I'll say from a book that I read over the summer. So I'm not a sports guy by any means, but actually I was highly recommended to read "Shoe Dog," Phil Knight's biography. And I'll say it's an extraordinary biography. You learn about his business and how he built this from this funny name Blue Ribbon to the global firm that we think of as Nike.
0:26:58.5 Cindy Moehring: Yeah.
0:27:00.1 Eugene Soltes: What I really enjoyed about the book is, entrepreneurs when they're starting up a firm, it's rough and tumble. They're not only doing things, but I recall... Let's just say, compliance policy 101. Let's just say they're going with how it goes. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, once you've made it to the Fortune 50 status, you look back and you forget that rough and tumble days when you weren't always a global leader. And what Phil Knight describes in the book is a number of incidents. When he effectively defrauded banks. There were several instances in which they didn't want him to do something, he did the exact opposite, and that was critical for his growth.
0:27:39.7 Cindy Moehring: Oh.
0:27:41.4 Eugene Soltes: And it's something... I think him describing that and actually reflecting that he wasn't comfortable with it at the time, but he saw the dilemma. If he didn't do this, he couldn't go ahead and he saw the opportunity. I actually think it's one of the best and most realistic cases of seeing, I'll say, even though it's obviously written in hindsight, almost this real-time just conflict of someone that I think we quite rightfully respect and admire what he built. So I loved reading it and just seeing that struggle.
0:28:12.5 Cindy Moehring: That's cool. I will have to add that to my list. What about any shows or podcasts? Have you been watching any fun Netflix series or anything?
0:28:20.5 Eugene Soltes: Sure. I'll say one of my favorite, given more on this, is Billions. I mean it's nothing short of...
0:28:24.5 Cindy Moehring: Billions. I love it.
0:28:25.2 Eugene Soltes: It's brilliant.
0:28:26.6 Cindy Moehring: Brilliant.
0:28:28.5 Eugene Soltes: The last thing when I come home is my wife wants to hear more about anything relating to corporate integrity or fraud, but she loves Billions too, which is... I like that they can create a show that's not just fun to watch, but if you actually see the language in the description actually manages, I think, to capture a lot of the complex dynamics, obviously with a little bit of extra color in there.
0:28:47.4 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, yeah. I do too.
0:28:48.2 Eugene Soltes: But the show is amazing. Anyone that's not watching it that is listening to your podcast has sorely missed out, and that's the first thing I recommend they start doing that night. Get some popcorn.
[chuckle]
0:28:57.2 Cindy Moehring: I would agree. It's a great one. [chuckle] Alright, we'll end there. I think there's a new season coming out of that pretty soon, hopefully, when COVID hasn't put it off of the track too long, but this has been a great conversation, Eugene. Thank you so much for your time, your knowledge, your wisdom and just sharing your thoughts with us today. Really appreciate it.
0:29:15.5 Eugene Soltes: My pleasure. This has been a lot of fun.
0:29:17.4 Cindy Moehring: Great, thank you. Bye-bye.
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