If I come from the position of what is right and what is wrong, then I'm not their counselor. I can't impose my views. Well, we've smashed them all, and now neither we nor anybody else have anything left. Senator Dan Coats, Imprimis , Vol. 20, No. 9, September 1991.
Few executives can afford the luxury of a conscience.
A business that defined right and wrong in terms that would satisfy a well-developed contemporary conscience could not survive. When the directors and managers enter the board room to debate policy, they park their private consciences outside. If they didn't they would fail in their responsibility to the company that pays them. No company employs a vice president in charge of ethical standards, and sooner or later the conscientious executive is likely to come up against a stone wall of corporate indifference to private moral values. In the real world of today's business, he is almost surely a troubled man.