Vikas Anand is the Executive Director of MBA Programs and Graduate Innovation at the Walton College of Business. He has authored award-winning research papers along with countless recognitions for his excellence in teaching. His diverse academic background has contributed to a unique perspective as he leads the Walton MBA program.
Dr. Anand served as a member of the Business Integrity Leadership Initiative advisory board and has been a strong promoter of business ethics education at the University of Arkansas.
Podcast:
Episode Transcript:
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0:00:13.6 Cindy Moehring: Hi, everybody. Welcome back for another episode of The BIS, the Business Integrity School. And I am really excited to let you know that I have with me today Vikas Anand, Professor at the Walton College of Business. Hi, Vikas. Thanks for being here today.
0:00:28.8 Vikas Anand: Thank you for inviting me, Cindy. Appreciate it.
0:00:31.3 Cindy Moehring: You are absolutely welcome. It is my honor. And Vikas not only serves as a Professor and has for many years at Walton College, he also is a member of my academic advisory committee and has been a big help to me over the last few years. So currently, Vikas is a professor in our Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Venture Innovation department, and he is also the Executive Director of the MBA Programs and Graduate Innovation. And Vikas, like I said, has been with Walton College for a long time, since 1999, after he completed his PhD in Management at Arizona State University. And during his nearly 21-year career at Walton College, he has done so many exceptional things in the way of teaching and research, and service, so let me tell you just a little bit about it before we dive in.
0:01:22.3 Cindy Moehring: Vikas is universally recognized as one of the best teachers on campus. He's won 12 teaching awards at the college and the university level since 2007. He's also a member of the University of Arkansas Teaching Academy, and as you can imagine, Vikas has touched the lives of many of our students and is one of their favorite professors. I hear that about you frequently, Vikas. He also has an international reputation for his research and in studying decision-making, ethics, and corruption. And in fact, his paper titled Business as Usual: The Acceptance and Perpetuation of Corruption in Organizations won the Academy of Management Executive 2005 Best Paper award, and it was one of the featured articles in a special issue that recognized the top 10 most influential papers in 20 years in the AME Publications. That's quite an honor. Congratulations.
0:02:20.8 Vikas Anand: Thank you.
0:02:21.1 Cindy Moehring: On top of all that, of his teaching and his research, he also has served in very many important administrative roles for Walton College in the last 14 years. Too many to mention here so I'll mention just a few. He's been the Executive Director of the Innovation and Strategy Planning group, the Chair of the Department of Management, and Executive Director of the MBA Programs and Graduate Innovation. Vikas, that is quite a storied career and you are beginning a new chapter here shortly, so let me be the first to tell you and our audience, congratulations, and it is bittersweet though, to tell you that. Vikas is leaving later this spring to join North Carolina State University as the Associate Dean for Programs in the Poole College of Management. You will be sorely missed, Vikas. And thank you for being with us today.
0:03:14.3 Vikas Anand: Thank you, Cindy. It's a real honor and I appreciate being invited, and thank you for all the kind things you said. Always said if you work long enough, you end up with a lot of lines on the resume, so don't want to overblow those things either.
0:03:32.3 Cindy Moehring: Well, as an individual, I just have really enjoyed getting to know you and we share a special love of the topic of ethics and integrity, and corruption and compliance and governance, risk management, all of that. And you have a really quite an interesting, I think, personal story in that regard that kind of brought you to where you are today. And it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you on the podcast. So, Vikas, we have been talking in Season 2 and now in Season 3 with a number of academic thought leaders, business thought leaders, and practitioners about the future of business ethics, and it all really comes from an article that was written in the Harvard Business Review over 25 years ago now, called, What's Wrong With Business Ethics?
0:04:28.8 Cindy Moehring: And interestingly, it still comes up near the top of a Google search for business ethics. And when I talked to the author, Andy Stark, who I also interviewed, about that, he and I agreed that it was really time to bring that body of research forward and to talk about not only the progress we've made in the last 25 years, both in how it's taught and how it's practiced, but also to look into the future and to predict what does business ethics need to look like in the next 25 years. So let me ask you, what you think about where it is today? At the time, the article was written 25 years ago, Vikas, it was criticized as being too general and too philosophical, and too impractical. Do you think that still applies? Where do you think we are today?
0:05:19.4 Vikas Anand: I think like most topics, most areas of research, the area of business ethics has evolved. At the time the article was written, business ethics was not at the forefront of most manager's minds. If you looked at most business schools, there was an optional class on business ethics, and I had one such in my MBA program where we were told to be good, effectively. And I think part of it was that for some reason, it was seen that white-collar workers usually, which is where most business students ended up, "I'm not going to be doing anything wrong," there was that implicit assumption. And in some ways, I think the scandals that happened with Enron, with Parmalat, all around the world, it brought into focus that, "Yes, there is a problem, and it's acute and something needs to be done." So there was a convergence of forces. There was, first of all, the fact that social media had made information more widely available.
0:06:44.2 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:06:44.7 Vikas Anand: Made us much more aware of both the challenges of ethics and corporations and the consequences of unethical behaviour. There was a huge effort in the governments of many of the countries in the world to bring in legislation to address corporate crime, and simultaneously with it we began to see an evolution in how we began to think about ethics. So, from being primarily a research-driven, from a psychological perspective about why people are bad, why they make wrong choices, a more nuanced understanding of ethics began to emerge. I think till about 2001, the predominant thoughts on ethical decision-making were the bad apple and the bad barrel approach, which Linda Trevino had brought in, which is still relevant, very relevant from the psychology traditions.
0:07:55.6 Vikas Anand: But then we began to think that, Well, there are other ways of looking at it. For instance, is it possible that there's an environment which makes people make choices which are unethical. Because we had to come to terms with the fact that when we are looking at unethical behavior, there's the right and then there's the wrong, and then there's the in-between.
0:08:27.8 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:08:28.9 Vikas Anand: And one of the biggest challenges that we began to understand when we began to look at the traditions of sociology and some more macro psychology was that, it's not that people are choosing to be wrong, it's just that they begin to think that sometimes the wrong things they are doing are actually right.
0:08:51.4 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:08:51.8 Vikas Anand: So, I'm probably not as much of a pessimist about where we were and where we are going. I feel... I see that as a natural evolution.
0:09:00.7 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, a natural progression and evolution, and it's become more behavioral, social science-based, a little less philosophical, more practical. So, Vikas before you got into the teaching profession and becoming a professor, you had your own career, your own corporate career. And you have shared with me how some experiences you had when you were working in the business world, really, I'll call them integrity moments. [chuckle] And you had several of those, and you had been kind enough to share them with me and how they, sort of, shaped your thinking and who you are as a person and the person you wanted to be and become. And I actually think that before we get into talking about your own research, which was celebrated by the Academy of Management that, if you don't mind, I'd love it if you'd share some of your own business story with the audience, because I have a feeling it impacted, as well, some of your own research later on.
0:10:12.8 Vikas Anand: It did. After I graduated with my MBA, I was very fortunate to get picked up and had the opportunity to work with two multinationals, which gave me a lot of opportunity. I was in the arena of International Business and International Marketing, developing some shared collaborations with people, and I spent a lot of my time in the Middle East, South East Asia, Africa and you know doing business at that time, the world was very interesting because the kind of free trade, ease of doing business that we see today, relatively speaking, didn't exist at that time. We lived in an era of apartheid. There were a lot of challenges. And in many countries, the government was a major buyer, and it was hard to make sales or get business done without people engaging in corruption or bribery. The bribery was endemic. There may have been a country, that if you landed and you were going through customs, if you were unwilling to bribe somebody in the customs, they may find drugs in your bag.
0:11:53.5 Vikas Anand: There were situations that if you were not willing to pay bribes, your cargo at your port may not get cleared in a timely manner. But especially when you were bidding for organizations or government contracts, there were a lot of challenges over there. And I was exposed to a lot of issues, which I saw happening in the marketplace.
0:12:27.6 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:12:29.1 Vikas Anand: And some of the people who were very keen players or key players in that tradition, and I would talk to them because at that time, I was honed on a tradition that it's business, you're doing things for the company, so you don't naturally develop a... Or at least I did not naturally develop a dislike for people who were engaging in activities that, at least, I'm glad even at that time I knew were not right. And when you talk to them, one of the things that really struck me was that these were not evil people, these were not bad people, most of them were not making any money, they just were doing business as usual. And I had begun to wonder at that time...
0:13:21.1 Vikas Anand: How do people who are otherwise very good, who go and raise their kids, teach them all the principles of the ten commandments, don't realize that they are breaking those same things, they're doing something which is contrary to that? And I had some personal experiences where I was specifically asked for things which mortified me when I was dealing with some government officials and I began to wonder that, how is it that people can ask for things like that? I remember a government official... I mean, they crossed all limits of decency at times, and it made me wonder how do you do that? And then you go home and you raise your kids and you go to a church or a mosque or a temple, how do you square that in your head, and that often times became the basis of some of the research that my colleagues and I did.
0:14:31.9 Cindy Moehring: With the rise in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and here in the United States at least, and other governments having sort of the countries having the same kind of laws, do you think that it has gotten better?
0:14:47.5 Vikas Anand: It has gotten better, but... And it's one of the things that when I was thinking about this podcast, some of the things that I encountered seemed to have gotten a lot better, definitely in terms of transparency with respect to accounting, things are a lot better. The FCPA has made it harder, more than the FCPA because the FCPA existed when I was there, but the anti-bribery convention that the European countries and Japan have joined in that has clearly made a difference. Social media and a free media has made a big difference. But new challenges seem to come up with respect to ethics. Today we are not necessarily talking about corruption and favors, as much, we are talking about is it ethical for instance to share and collect data, consumer data. So the challenges are different. Is that appropriate to conform to a country's laws if they conflict with the values of a different country, these are challenges that companies like Google and Facebook face.
0:16:07.9 Cindy Moehring: Yes, they do.
0:16:09.0 Vikas Anand: So it's just almost as though the whole issue has shifted into a different set of arenas...
0:16:19.8 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, I would agree. But the one thing that I think has remained the same is this sense of the white collar business aspect of ethics, meaning that it's different than if somebody were just to go in and say, "Rob a bank," there's a clear victim in that case, and there's a clear perpetrator and you can clearly identify that something bad happened, but when you're talking about corruption where an individual might not personally benefit from it... Right. It's just helping the company, or when you're collecting data again, and it's broad consumers, you're collecting the data from, the perpetration, if you will, of an ethical behavior becomes attenuated from who the victims are, and it becomes harder to crystallize that in your mind, which can often times be one of those rationalizations, victimless crime, if you will, that causes people to have the mindset of, "Okay, I can do this because this is how you have to do business, but now I'm gonna go home to my family," kind of that disconnect, that discord that you were mentioning before...
0:17:40.2 Vikas Anand: Right.
0:17:40.7 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, so let's talk then a little bit about your article that won accolades from the Academy of Management, which still has relevance today, because in that article you do talk about rationalization tactics, and you talk about socialization processes that can allow any type really of unethical behavior to exist in organizations. So can you just share with the audience, what do you mean when you say rationalization tactics and what are some of those?
0:18:21.9 Vikas Anand: So as I had mentioned a little earlier, one of the challenges that drove our thinking into this was, why is that people who are otherwise, who would define themselves as very moral individuals, why would they do something which was wrong? And as we started digging into research, which went as far back as work done at Nuremberg after world war two into the Nazis, work by some psychologists and sociologists. Individuals develop ways of thinking, mental tactics, as we call them, which makes something which is unethical appear to be ethical. There are various forms of it... The paper that you're referring to is actually a practitioner version of a larger body of research we had done, which was published in Research and Organizational Behavior, where we had identified 13 rationalization tactics.
0:19:32.3 Vikas Anand: I think eight were presented in this article. So, you would have a situation like, a denial of victim. So, for instance, when traders were taking advantage of the older people and getting them to invest in stocks that they knew they were done, they wouldn't talk... When they were discussing, those people amongst themselves, they would never really refer to them as Mrs. Smith or Mrs. So and so, it was always all these patsies, these ignorance. What you have done is, you have dehumanized the people, in some ways.
0:20:13.0 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:20:15.0 Vikas Anand: So, that you don't even think of them as people, so you're denying that there's any victim in some way.
0:20:19.9 Cindy Moehring: That's right.
0:20:20.5 Vikas Anand: You've depersonalized that so much. The most extreme form could be situations like Auschwitz or anything where people were completely stripped of their humanity in the way that... Before you made a decision to gas them, and... But at smaller levels, we start thinking of, "Oh, these are suckers, or these are... You don't think of the people you are hurting as people. That would be one way of thinking it, thinking about it. Another rationalization could be what we call, denial of harm.
0:20:56.6 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:21:00.6 Vikas Anand: This company makes billions of dollars, so what if I stole a screwdriver? No one is really hurt by it.
0:21:06.2 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:21:07.0 Vikas Anand: Right. So, in your mind, you're not doing anything wrong because the company can apparently afford it, or we are just putting, changing some numbers on an accounting balance sheet, that doesn't hurt anyone.
0:21:22.9 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:21:24.6 Vikas Anand: And so that would be a denial of harm. Or it could be that, I'm contributing so much to charities, if I have taken a little from here, that's okay, because I'm more than compensating for it, that would be an... Balancing the ledger approach, that would be another form of a rationalization. So, there are multiple ways, and we often... The more we surround ourselves with people who use these, the more the use of these rationalizations becomes embedded in our brain and it seems okay to use them, because the people we socialize with also, and we call this a social cocoon, have the same ways of thinking.
0:22:12.0 Cindy Moehring: Oh.
0:22:13.6 Vikas Anand: But nobody challenges us and if you see that in many of the places where we've examined companies which had normalized corruption, the perpetrators hung out with people who use the same language and the same way of thinking as them, so that nobody could ever prick that balloon they've built for themselves.
0:22:30.4 Cindy Moehring: Interesting. Social cocoon, interesting. And so, you refer to that is as when they were... The people they associated with, even outside the company.
0:22:42.1 Vikas Anand: That's right.
0:22:42.9 Cindy Moehring: Yeah.
0:22:44.3 Vikas Anand: And that's something we saw... So, for instance, one of the most egregious cases we had seen was... You may recall the sexual harassment, widespread... Widespread sexual harassment that had happened at Mitsubishi's plant in Normal, Illinois. And a lot of the people when they were dis... Who were perpetrators, from what I had read, would be also socializing after hours, and describing... And so, it all looked normal because everybody around may think it's okay.
0:23:21.5 Cindy Moehring: Is that an example then of the socialization processes that you talked about in your article as well?
0:23:26.5 Vikas Anand: No, the socialization processes... So, I think our focus in our original research was... You know that if, there are certain organizations where corruption goes on for a long time. And how will that happen because you can explain single acts of unethical behaviour because there was a bad person. But if it's gone on in an organization for six years, new people who are coming in, who may not have had the same values, but somehow they bought into that system.
0:24:01.1 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:24:02.2 Vikas Anand: So, what we found was that many of these organizations or the subunits, they developed unique processes through which when newcomers entered the organization, they were socialized. And there were three that we identified, I think in both the papers. One was co-optation. So, let's just say that there is a practice within a subunit of padding your expense reports when you've gone traveling. And hints are dropped, that it's done, and then when someone does it, the person may get a pat on the back or something, some sort of reward, there is this promise that if they buy-in, they will become part of the unit, they will have access to better resources and they may even be... Because they are part of the system, they'll get promoted faster. So, there are these intangible links that are created, that if you did it, you'd see the advantage, and then you could have incrementalism, I think in the paper, we use the example, which we had found about, when the corruption scandals in the New York Police were unearthed. I think it was in the 1970s, that when newcomers came in and some of the police officers have been taking bribes from store owners and other things...
0:25:38.8 Vikas Anand: That, initially, the rookie would be told, "Oh, it's a common practice that they'll give us a pack of cigarettes or so," and taking a pack of cigarette doesn't seem so bad. So, the rookie would be asked to do that. And then, when they got used to that, they said, "Oh, maybe a cigarette and something to eat." And then, when you became conscious to that, it might go into actually taking money. So, you introduce the rookie in steps so that it's just a small deviation. Then, you get used to it and then, another smaller deviation. That's socialization practice called incrementalism.
0:26:18.9 Cindy Moehring: That's great. Understood.
0:26:20.9 Vikas Anand: Which is often used in corrupt subunits. There's compromise and this is the tricky one. So, I think the example we had used was a story about a manager of a company which had to keep their pollution under check. But if they were to do that, the cost would go so much that the unit could be shut down. And the manager was really concerned because felt himself responsible for the employees, didn't want them to lose their jobs. He knew that it would cause a lot of suffering. So, would ensure that he would leak some of the effluence out into the river at night when no one noticed, to keep the cost low. And this was just being stuck in a very hard place and oftentimes, people are... When in an organizational unit, something unethical like that is happening, the rookie can be put in a situation where they have to choose between two alternatives. They tend to make the unethical choice because of their loyalty to a group or to their family or something.
0:27:51.6 Vikas Anand: And then, once you have done it two or three times, then naturally, you are going to become... You will naturally defend the practices you are doing so, it leads to a sustained process of corruption in a subunit. So yeah, there were three socialization tactics. Actually, in the original paper, we have talked about three pillars of normalized corruption. The third one was institutionalization because once, unethical practice has gone on for a long time because of socialization and rationalization, it actually gets built into the systems. The paperwork and everything gets adjusted to support it. And once you have that happening, the people who are perpetuating that practice don't even know that they are contributing to corruption. People are not even conscious of what's happening. They just enact mindlessly. Unrooting something like this becomes pretty hard.
0:28:58.9 Cindy Moehring: Yeah. So, those socialization processes are things that I think are very relevant for new young business managers to be aware of when they enter their subunit or department to be on the look-out for and have their radar up, for practices where they're being co-opted into doing something that they know is wrong but feel like they need to do it to be accepted or, the small incremental steps that they take or the having to choose between one or the other and trying to figure out, how do I compromise between the two, right?
0:29:34.7 Vikas Anand: Oh, yeah.
0:29:35.0 Cindy Moehring: Yeah. So, very, very interesting. So, Vikas, what do you think are the three, let's say, most important things that business schools can do to better prepare business students to enter this disruptive business world we live in now and still manage ethically?
0:29:58.5 Vikas Anand: I'm a strong believer that giving lectures and making people read books and then, answering questions in multiple choice exams, in some ways, is a disservice because we make the concept of ethics and values as just another exam to be answered. I'm a strong believer that we have to try and bring in experiential activities, whether it is simulations, working on projects and then, as they make decisions, focus them on the dilemmas and other situations that they didn't even think about as they were making decisions and ask them to have discussions subsequent to that. For somebody to realize that, "Oops, I was thinking of doing this and I hadn't even thought of the ethical implications," is a lesson they will carry with them for years later.
0:31:00.8 Cindy Moehring: I agree.
0:31:01.3 Vikas Anand: And our objective of education has to be to create change in the actions and thoughts they will have after graduation, not worry so much about the exam part of it. The second thing and I've seen you do a lot of this is it's one thing to get a lecture from one of the professors. Students at some stage learn to tune us out but bring in people who've had challenges with ethical dilemmas. I believe that you brought in a gentleman who has suffered serious consequences because of his actions. Come in and tell them, "This is what I did. This is why I did it." I know from experience, those are things that last with students. And then, the third thing is, for me, is the concept of ethics is not a subject. It has to be embedded in the system. Just like when I say that corruption can get embedded, good values and ethics can also get embedded. So, from my way of thinking, we need to be... If we are teaching them accounting, we have to be teaching them what are some of the challenges they will face as auditors, as...
0:32:25.4 Cindy Moehring: Right, right, right.
0:32:26.7 Vikas Anand: If we are teaching them strategy, we have to teach them the ethical aspects, ethical principles, and values. I think our objective when we are teaching them has to be to measure that do they have a pre-set set of values at the time they graduate, which will guide their decision-making when they are working in organizations. And I think for that, it has to be more systemic as opposed to being a course they take in one semester in a four-year or a two-year program. So that's what I believe universities can and should do, because I think as a society, the cost of unethical behavior is now becoming unbearable.
0:33:17.1 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, it's very high, I would agree.
0:33:19.0 Vikas Anand: Yeah.
0:33:20.6 Cindy Moehring: So we've talked about how business ethics has changed over the years, I mean, it wasn't really thought about the way it is now 25, 30 years ago, then it kind of went through and we're still dealing with some corruption today, but now it's kind of morphed into this dealing with collection of data, and how do you deal with artificial intelligence in an ethical way, so the field itself is, and the issues are morphing and changing. If you had a crystal ball and were able to predict, so this is your time to be the wizard on the hill, [chuckle] and if you were to sit back and think about where you think business ethics will be in the future, in the next 25 years, let's say, what are the three words or themes that you think would best describe business ethics in the future?
0:34:16.0 Vikas Anand: I think it's hard to distinguish what I think it will be and what I hope it will be. [chuckle] So I don't know if my answer is... I think it's somewhere in between.
0:34:29.4 Cindy Moehring: Okay.
0:34:30.4 Vikas Anand: I'll begin with, the first word I'll use is of big pictures, that it is going to underlie almost everything we do, because the kind of change we are facing in the world today is similar to what we faced at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Everything that we believe about how we act, how we do things, how things will operate is changing very fast.
0:35:00.3 Cindy Moehring: Yes.
0:35:01.0 Vikas Anand: I sometimes think the word singularity is very strong, but I think that that's the direction in which we are going. Instant knowledge, technology has changed, how we do things, that today if I was to talk something to my... If I was to say something to my dog, I'm not sure that Alexa won't hear that and I won't see an ad in my Facebook feed 10 minutes later. I think there are some huge ethical challenges with respect to the new technologies that are coming in. And I think whether you're doing engineering, whether you're doing medicine, whether you're doing business, ethics has to be prevalent and embedded in every form of education. So I believe that that's what should happen, and I think it will happen because we are conscious about it. The second word I would use is interdisciplinary. That we have spent too many years of focusing on ethics from, "This is the box from which we have to look at it." Those boxes are vanishing.
0:36:17.1 Cindy Moehring: Yes.
0:36:17.7 Vikas Anand: And if we are not respectful of the different ways of looking at ethics and integrating them in how we teach, I think we will be doing a disservice as educators and researchers. I think for me, the third word would be neo-traditional that, yes, while all these new things are coming in, the old concepts will continue to be relevant. Let's not dis the philosophical aspects because that's where we get our ways of thinking, that's where our values will evolve.
0:36:56.7 Cindy Moehring: Right, it's the ground.
0:36:57.6 Vikas Anand: We cannot predict, yeah, we can't predict for our students that this is the ethical choice we can have. What we can teach them is these are the ways you will have to think about your ethical choices. This is the way you have to develop your values. So I think those are the three words that I would use.
0:37:16.7 Cindy Moehring: That's great. Those are very thoughtful. Vikas, this has been a fabulous conversation, and I wanna end on sort of a fun note, and you can think kinda mainstream media here, but have you been reading or watching or listening to anything lately just for fun, but that also sort of has that ethical dilemma embedded in it that you could leave as a recommendation?
0:37:43.9 Vikas Anand: So I just finished reading the biography of Andrew Carnegie.
0:37:47.8 Cindy Moehring: Okay.
0:37:48.3 Vikas Anand: And about an year ago, I had also read Titan, which was the biography of John D. Rockefeller. Now, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, very different people, but in one way, they were very similar. They wanted to earn money so that they could give it away to do good.
0:38:08.6 Cindy Moehring: Yeah.
0:38:09.7 Vikas Anand: Right? So Andrew Carnegie had the intention of giving away 90% of his wealth. By the time he was 65, he invested in the museums, libraries, that was a passion for him, in America and in England, and Scotland. The challenge was that that allowed him to justify how he made his money, it was the same thing with John D. Rockefeller. And oftentimes, when I read some of the papers he wrote at the time of some of the really harsh tactics he used to break up the labor strikes, the hard-nosed bargaining, where he would not budge from the 12-hour workday, six to seven days a week. Some of the suggestions he gave to his managers on how to take down the workers on the assumption that the more money he makes, the more word he can do to the world.
0:39:14.3 Vikas Anand: To me, it was a very interesting dilemma. That here was somebody who was focusing on the one hand that he has to maximize the return from the capital, and he's contra. He was controversial. Today we forget some of the things both of them went through, especially with respect to the labors rights and the actions that happened over there. How do you handle that? Was that good? Was that bad? Because he did do a lot of good to a lot of subsequent generations.
0:39:49.5 Cindy Moehring: Yes.
0:39:50.0 Vikas Anand: I still consider going to the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburg as one of the most educational experiences I've had. I plan to take my kids again over there.
0:40:01.4 Cindy Moehring: Right.
0:40:04.2 Vikas Anand: Very interesting dilemma. And those are two books that I do recommend, and I'm not taking a position about right or wrong.
0:40:11.7 Cindy Moehring: Right, right.
0:40:11.8 Vikas Anand: Certainly a huge dilemma.
0:40:13.7 Cindy Moehring: Yeah.
0:40:15.1 Vikas Anand: I'm reading anther book, it should be around here. But it's Caste by...
0:40:21.2 Cindy Moehring: Isabel.
0:40:22.9 Vikas Anand: Isabel Wilkerson where she tries to relate the challenges of how we have... In effect what she's saying is that there is no difference between the caste systems of India and the racial tensions and racial categories we have created in America.
0:40:45.9 Cindy Moehring: Oh wow. How interesting.
0:40:47.3 Vikas Anand: And how some of the policies that existed in southern United States, and I'm only 75% of the way through the book.
0:40:57.8 Cindy Moehring: Yeah.
0:41:00.1 Vikas Anand: Were actually the basis for some of the laws enacted by the Nazis in 1935. I will say that as somebody who has been on every side of the equation. I am what would be considered an upper caste in India. Have I done some things now when I think back, especially after reading that book that were insensitive, did not value people of a different caste as highly as I should have? Absolutely. Do I think that I'm a casteist or I think differently of people? I've always believed I'm very open, and yet it has opened my eyes. Those are the three books that...
0:41:42.7 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, that's great.
0:41:44.9 Vikas Anand: I would recommend at this point.
0:41:47.3 Cindy Moehring: Good. Well, thank you. Well because this has just been a treat to have this time and for you to be able to share your words of wisdom and your thoughts on this topic with me and with our audience. And I just wanna thank you so, so much for your time today. It's been fabulous.
0:42:07.2 Vikas Anand: Thank you so much Cindy, I really enjoyed this and I appreciate being invited.
0:42:12.6 Cindy Moehring: Absolutely. Alright, thank you. Bye-bye.
0:42:15.3 Vikas Anand: Okay. Bye.
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